Air quality tests by Texas environmental regulators found no problems

Tag : Paint Chemicals
Hurricane Ike's winds and massive wavesdestroyed oil platforms, tossed storage tanks and puncturedpipelines. The environmental damage only now is becoming apparent:At least a half million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulfof Mexico and the marshes, bayous and bays of Louisiana and Texas,according to an analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
In the days before and after the deadly storm, companies andresidents reported at least 448 releases of oil, gasoline anddozens of other substances into the air and water and onto theground in Louisiana and Texas. The hardest hit places wereindustrial centers near Houston and Port Arthur, Texas, as well asoil production facilities off Louisiana's coast, according to theAP's analysis.
"We are dealing with a multitude of different types of pollutionhere ... everything from diesel in the water to gasoline to thingslike household chemicals," said Larry Chambers, a petty officerwith the U.S. Coast Guard Command Center in Pasadena, Texas.
The Coast Guard, with the Environmental Protection Agency and stateagencies, has responded to more than 3,000 pollution reportsassociated with the storm and its surge along the upper Texascoast. Most callers complain about abandoned propane tanks, paintcans and other hazardous materials containers turning up inmarshes, backyards and other places.
No major oil spills or hazardous materials releases have beenidentified, but nearly 1,500 sites still need to be cleaned up.
The Coast Guard's National Response Center in Washington collectsinformation on oil spills and chemical and biological releases andpasses it to agencies working on the ground. The AP analyzed allreports received by the center from Sept. 11 through Sept. 18 forLouisiana and Texas, providing an early snapshot of Ike'senvironmental toll.
With the storm approaching, refineries and chemical plants shutdown as a precaution, burning off hundreds of thousands of poundsof organic compounds and toxic chemicals. In other cases, powerfailures sent chemicals such as ammonia directly into theatmosphere. Such accidental releases probably will not result inpenalties by regulators because the releases are being blamed onthe storm.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry also suspended all rules, includingenvironmental ones, that would inhibit or prevent companiespreparing for or responding to Ike.
Power outages also caused sewage pipes to stop flowing. Elsewhere,the storm's surge dredged up smelly and oxygen-deprived marsh mud,which killed fish and caused residents to complain of nausea andheadaches from the odor.
At times, a new spill or release was reported to the Coast Guardevery five minutes to 10 minutes. Some were extremely detailed,such as this report from Sept. 14: "Caller is making a report of a6-by-4-foot container that was found floating in the Houston ShipChannel. Caller states the container was also labeled 'UM 3264,'which is a corrosive material." The caller most likely meantUN3264, an industrial coding that refers to a variety of differentacids.
State and federal officials have collected thousands of abandoneddrums, paint cans and other containers.
Other reports were more vague. One caller reported a sheen from anunderwater pipeline and said the substance was "spewing" from thepipe.
The AP's analysis found that, by far, the most common contaminantleft in Ike's wake was crude oil — the lifeblood and mainindustry of both Texas and Louisiana. In the week of reportsanalyzed, enough crude oil was spilled nearly to fill anOlympic-sized swimming pool, and more could be released, officialssaid, as platforms and pipelines were turned back on.
The Minerals Management Service, which oversees oil production infederal waters offshore, said the storm destroyed at least 52 oilplatforms of roughly 3,800 in the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty-two morewere severely damaged. But there was only one confirmed report ofan oil spill — a leak of 8,400 gallons that officials saidleft no trace because it dissipated with the winds and currents.
Air contaminants were the second-most common release, mostly fromthe chemical plants and refineries along the coast.
About half the crude oil was reported spilled at a facilityoperated by St. Mary Land and Exploration Co. on Goat Island,Texas, a spit of uninhabited land north of the heavily damagedBolivar Peninsula. The surge from the storm flooded the plant,leveling its dirt containment wall and snapping off the pipesconnecting its eight storage tanks, which held the oil and waterproduced from two wells in Galveston Bay.
By the time the company reached the wreckage by boat more than 24hours after Ike's landfall, the tanks were empty. Only a spatteringof the roughly 266,000 gallons of oil spilled was left, and that isalready cleaned up, according to Greg Leyendecker, the company'sregional manager. The rest vanished, likely into the Gulf ofMexico.
Ike's fury might have helped prevent worse environmental damage.Its rough water, heavy rains and wind helped disperse pollution.
Air quality tests by Texas environmental regulators found noproblems even in communities near industrial complexes, where poweroutages and high winds in some cases knocked out emergency devicesthat safely burn off chemicals. But the storm also zapped many ofthe state's permanent air pollution monitors in the region.
"We came out of this a lot better than we could have been,especially thinking where the storm hit," said Kelly Cook, thehomeland security coordinator for the Texas Commission onEnvironmental Quality.
Katrina ranked as among the worst environmental disasters in U.S.history, with about 9 million gallons of oil spilled. But Ike'sstorm surge was less severe than feared — 12 feet rather than20-feet plus — and the dikes, levees and bulkheads builtaround the region's heavy industry mostly held.
Much of that infrastructure is protected by a 1960s-era Army Corpsof Engineers system of 15-foot levees similar to the one around NewOrleans that failed catastrophically during Katrina. In that storm,floodwaters dislodged an oil tank at a Murphy Oil Corp. refinery inMeraux, La., spilling more than 1 million gallons of oil into thesurrounding neighborhoods, canals and playgrounds.
Ike's toll on wildlife is still unfolding. Only a few pelicans andosprey turned up oiled, but the storm upended nature. Winds blewmore than 1,000 baby squirrels from their nests. The storm's surgepushed saltwater into freshwater marshes and bayous, killinggrasses where cattle graze and displacing alligators. Flooding alsostranded cows.
The storm also may mangle migration. The Texas coast is a pit stopfor birds heading south for the winter. But Ike wiped out many oftheir food sources, stripping berries from trees andnectar-producing flowers from plants, said Gina Donovan, executivedirector of the Houston Audubon Society, which operates 17 birdsanctuaries in Texas.
"It is going to cause wildlife to suffer for awhile," she said.
Along the Houston Ship Channel, a tanker truck floating in12-feet-high flood waters slammed into a storage tank at thelargest biodiesel refinery in the country, causing a leak ofroughly 2,100 gallons of vegetable oil. The plant, owned byGreenHunter Energy Inc., uses chicken fat and beef tallow to makebiodiesel shipped overseas. It opened just months earlier.
Oneal Galloway of Slidell, La., called to report oil in hisneighborhood. The town, north of Lake Pontchartrain, was floodedwith Ike's surge. He said oil had washed down the streets.
"It looked like a rainbow in the water," Galloway told the AP. "Theresidue of the oil is all over our fences, there were brown spotsin the yard where it killed the grass."
The likely culprit was not a refinery or oil well, according toShannon Davis, the director of the parish's public worksdepartment, but a neighbor brewing biodiesel in his backyard withused cooking grease.
Cain Burdeau reported from Texas.