By Melanie Evans
The city of Houston, the Environmental Protection Agency and an
environmental advocacy group are investigating a potentially
hazardous plume of a carcinogenic substance in one neighborhood
after a nearby oil refiner reported its operations suffered
hurricane-related damage.
The city and the Environmental Defense Fund said extra air
monitors they dispatched to Houston's Manchester region on Monday
detected the presence of benzene, a component of crude oil and
gasoline.
Two monitors detected significantly different levels of the
carcinogen at different times of the day, and additional sampling
is needed to determine the concentration, according to Loren Raun,
chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health
Department, and Elena Craft, a senior health scientist at the
Environmental Defense Fund, which became involved in the probe
after offering the city assistance.
A Valero Energy Partners LP refinery in the neighborhood
reported a hurricane-related leak on Aug. 27.
The EPA said it was deploying an air monitor to the area on
Tuesday to help the investigation. Officials are seeking to
pinpoint the source of the benzene plume, the concentration and how
far-reaching the emissions may have spread, Ms. Raun said Tuesday
morning, after a call with EPA, EDF and Houston city officials.
"EPA continues to conduct ambient air monitoring in Houston and
is focusing on an area of potential concern associated with
reported air emissions from a Valero facility in Houston," said
David Gray, a spokesman for the agency.
A Manchester oil refinery that is a subsidiary of Valero Energy
Partners said the leak on Aug. 27 resulted in the emission of
benzene and other hazardous compounds, according to a copy of the
refiner's report to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality,
or TCEQ.
The report, which was filed through the State of Texas
Environmental Electronic Reporting System and is available on
TCEQ's website, said the leak was a result of "heavy rainfall
complications," and that cleanup was under way.
Valero Energy Corp. is the majority owner of Valero Energy
Partners. In an Aug. 29 statement on its website, Valero Energy
Corp. said Harvey's pounding rainfall sank the floating roof of a
crude-oil tank, leading to an oil leak.
The statement said the company's air-quality monitoring found
"no detectable levels of emissions in the community." Valero said
it didn't have an immediate update on Tuesday.
Companies must report emissions that exceed permitted amounts, a
TCEQ spokesman said, adding that the state "investigates all
emissions events that are reported to the agency."
Houston Health Department investigators who visited the Valero
refinery Tuesday found low traces of hazardous compounds using a
hand-held air monitor, which is used to identify whether compounds
are present, but doesn't identify specific compounds, Ms. Raun
said. Investigators didn't detect hazardous emissions from the
damaged tank Tuesday using an infared camera. "That's good news,"
she said.
Valero's disclosure to the TCEQ was one of 56 preliminary
emissions reports citing Hurricane Harvey that the state commission
received from petroleum and chemical companies as of Aug. 31,
according to an analysis of TCEQ filings by the Center for
Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson,
Ariz.
Those Harvey-related emissions released nearly 1 million pounds
of seven toxic compounds, including benzene, the group
reported.
TCEQ declined to comment on the nonprofit's Harvey-related
analysis.
In 2016, petroleum, chemical and polymer companies reported
3,289 emission events to the TCEQ, excluding events that were
scheduled or involved excess capacity, commission data show. Those
2016 events released 56 million pounds of materials, the data
show.
The majority of the Harvey-related reports involved hazardous
emissions triggered by the shutdown of operations as the storm
approached, said Shaye Wolf, an ecologist and climate science
director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Such shutdowns can
cause emissions that escape via a mechanism known as a flare, which
relieves pressure that builds up when operations cease quickly, she
said.
Other Harvey-related emissions reports, including Valero's
disclosure, involved storm damage to tanks, boilers, and power
systems that led to hazardous emissions, according to report data
available on TCEQ's site.
Public health officials worry when those pollutants concentrate
at ground level, instead of soaring into the atmosphere or being
diluted and dispersed by strong winds, said Michael Honeycutt,
director of the TCEQ toxicology division.
One of Houston's permanent air monitors in the vicinity of the
Manchester neighborhood is still disabled after it was flooded
during Hurricane Harvey, according to TCEQ. Texas has two
additional air-monitoring stations to the north and one to the
south of the flood-disabled monitor, a TCEQ spokesman said. Those
have been back online and working since Sept. 1, after the state
temporarily shut down its entire air-monitoring system before the
hurricane hit to prevent damage, he said.
Roughly 80% of state air-monitoring stations in Houston, Corpus
Christi and Beaumont were back up and running Monday, said Cory
Chism, who oversees air monitoring for the TCEQ. As the
air-monitoring network came back online, the state began receiving
pollution data again late on Aug. 31. "Nothing we have seen thus
far in the data has been out of the ordinary," Mr. Chism said of
the working monitors.
Write to Melanie Evans at Melanie.Evans@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 05, 2017 21:30 ET (01:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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