Katrina News Stories
Storm Stretches Refiners Past a Perilous Point
By JAD MOUAWAD
The New York Times
September 11, 2005
For the nation's oil refiners, Hurricane Katrina was a disaster long in
the making.
Analysts and industry executives had for years feared the consequences of
a storm ramming into the country's largest energy hub - a complex
infrastructure that spans most of the coastline between Texas and
Alabama, where nearly half of the nation's refineries are located.
Hurricane Katrina confirmed the worst predictions. Wreaking havoc along
the coastal states, drowning New Orleans and leaving many dead, the storm
shut down nearly all the gulf's offshore oil and gas production for over
a week. Racing to restore operations, the industry has brought about 60
percent of that back.
But even more crucially, it knocked off a dozen refineries at the peak of
summer demand, sending oil prices higher and gasoline prices to
inflation-adjusted records.
The events of the last two weeks have demonstrated how close to the edge
the country's refining system had been operating, even before the storm.
Because the last American refinery was built nearly 30 years ago - with
only a single new one now in the works - the problem is unlikely to
disappear quickly.
As a consequence, even though crude oil prices have fallen back to pre-
Katrina levels, prices for gasoline, heating oil, diesel and jet fuel are
expected to remain higher than they were before the storm for a much
longer period of time.
"There is now a greater realization that we don't have much extra
capacity," said Edward H. Murphy, a refining specialist at the American
Petroleum Institute, a trade and lobbying group. "It doesn't take a
Katrina, but even a smaller event can create a dislocation in the market.
Disasters like this can give you a billboard on the need to address this.
We need more capacity."
The rapid run-up in oil prices over the last two years has translated
into a boon for refiners after many years of meager returns. This year,
the refining margin - the difference between the cost of buying crude oil
and selling refined end products - has exceeded $20 a barrel, far above
the long-term average of $6. That has meant record profits for oil
companies and refiners and above-average stock performance on Wall Street.
With profits soaring, the nation's refiners are now being blamed by many
drivers and politicians for contributing to the run-up in prices. Indeed,
to critics of the industry, the higher profits are evidence of a policy
to intentionally limit refining capacity to improve the bottom line.
"Oil companies have jacked up gasoline prices through a simple mechanism:
reducing inventories and refining capacity," said Jamie Court, president
of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, an advocacy group,
whose views are widely shared by industry opponents.
"They are supposed to compete and bring the lowest price to consumers,"
Mr. Court said. "But the truth is that a small number of oil companies
cheat by working together by artificially reducing supplies."
But that argument misses the point, said Bob Slaughter, the president of
the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.
"What's happened can be explained by the higher cost of crude oil, the
difficulties in building new refineries and the disaster that cut right
through the heart of the industry," Mr. Slaughter said.
Currently, four major refineries, owned by Chevron, Exxon Mobil,
ConocoPhillips and Murphy Oil, are either flooded or without power, and
are likely to be out of commission for several weeks, perhaps months.
Together, these refine 880,000 barrels a day, or 5 percent of domestic
capacity. "It's very significant," said Colm McDermott, an oil analyst at
John S. Herold Inc. The loss is equal to 1 percent of the world's
refining capacity. "It's a global market and that's certainly enough to
have an impact on a global level."
As many as 15 other refineries, also affected by the storm, are resuming
production, but some are still operating at limited capacity.
"There's going to be a lot of pressure on these people to get things up
and running and deal with the maintenance issues as they come up," said
James W. Jones, a vice president at Turner, Mason & Company, a refining
consultancy in Dallas.
Many parts of the industry are recovering rapidly. The most damage
offshore was sustained by Royal Dutch Shell, which said Friday that its
production, usually about 450,000 barrels a day, would be down by 40
percent through the end of the year.
But even as oil and gas production returns in the gulf, the time that it
will take refineries to get back to full speed will be a key factor in
determining how long product prices will remain elevated.
Under normal conditions, because of the close proximity of volatile
materials, high pressure and fire, restarting a refinery is a dangerous
process that can take anywhere between three to seven days.
In the refinery, oil is heated to around 1,110 degrees Fahrenheit, turned
into vapor and then collected at various temperatures, creating products
that are further refined to remove impurities, allowing for the
production of gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel and kerosene.
For the four damaged refineries - three are in the vicinity of New
Orleans, and the fourth is in Pascagoula, Miss. - restarting will involve
a much longer process. First, power must be restored. Once that happens,
generators, pumps and other electrical equipment flooded by brackish
water will need to be dried out. Removing salt sediments will add to the
ordeal. Then the operators must check that none of their main systems
have suffered any structural damage before firing them back up.
So far, none of the refineries have provided an estimate of how long all
that will take. In its latest report, Chevron, whose 325,000 barrels-a-
day refinery is the largest of the four, said "it will be days before a
full estimate of damage is known or when operations can be safely brought
back online."
Most Americans now pay more than $3 a gallon for gasoline - matching
inflation-adjusted highs reached after the Iranian revolution in the late
1970's and early 1980's and the equivalent, on a per-barrel basis, to
$126. Oil prices, which touched a high of $70.85 a barrel last week, now
trade around $64 a barrel, still about $20 short of the record set in 1981.
"If we lose three or four refiners for two or three months, that
shortfall is going to be very difficult to make up," said William E.
Greehey, the chief executive of Valero, the nation's largest independent
refiner. "I don't know how anyone can blame it on us when we've just had
the worst natural disaster in the United States' history."
The refining outages prompted an international response from
industrialized nations to send emergency stocks of oil and gasoline to
the United States to plug the shortfall.
But that is only a temporary solution to a crisis that has been waiting
to erupt for years.
Since the 1980's, the number of refiners in the United States has been
cut in half. From a peak of 324 in 1981, the industry has shrunk to 149
as the smaller, less efficient and less profitable operators once
protected by price controls closed, leaving mostly larger companies in place.
Refining capacity has fallen about 10 percent, to 17 million barrels a
day, while oil consumption rose by 33 percent over the same 24-year
period, to 20.8 million barrels a day.
Meanwhile, refiners have been increasing their skill in turning crude
into useful products; efficiency improved by 27 percent between 1981 and
2004. Still, the difference must be made up by direct imports of refined
products, with gasoline imports now at 1 million barrels a day.
As their numbers dwindled, most remaining refiners expanded their plants
and added equipment to process more oil. Many refiners now typically run
at 95 percent of capacity, a level that is dangerously high and that has
led to a growing number of accidents in recent years.
In March, for example, a blast at BP's Texas City refinery, the country's
third-largest, killed 15 and injured 170 people. The company was blamed
by investigators with the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board
for "systemic lapses."
Following the agency's recommendation, BP appointed an independent panel
last month to review the "safety culture" of its American refining operations.
Only one project to build a new refinery is currently under way. For the
last six years, Glenn McGinnis said he has been struggling to line up the
permits, funding and oil supplies to build a refinery from scratch in a
remote patch in Southwest Arizona.
"The fundamental reason why there has not been a new refinery built for
years is really two reasons - economics and uncertainty," Mr. McGinnis said.
Traditionally, the profit margin for refineries has averaged about 6
percent, a rate of return too low to encourage much new investment. Added
to that is the lengthy process involved in securing the permits from
state and federal agencies. "If you take permits, and engineering, and
building," Mr. McGinnis said, "you're talking about a 10-year horizon
from the time you decide to build to the day the refinery is completed."
Another issue that has slowed expansion, refiners said, was the cost of
complying with environmental regulations set in the 1990's under the
Clean Air Act. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that refiners
have spent $47 billion over the last decade to meet carbon-emission
standards and low-sulfur regulations, with more investments needed
through 2007. That, refiners say, is money not spent to raise capacity.
It has been cheaper to add refining capacity through acquisitions rather
than new projects. Valero recently bought Premcor for $10,000 a barrel of
capacity, a price many analysts deemed high. But that is well below the
$16,000 a barrel that Arizona Clean Fuels, Mr. McGinnis' project, expects
to invest.
Elsewhere in the world, some oil producers are planning to build new
refineries. Saudi Arabia is one of them. "We cannot keep producing oil
with no refineries," Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, told the
industry newsletter Petroleum Argus a few months ago. "There is a limit."
While helpful, such moves abroad would mostly serve to shift the
country's increasing reliance on foreign oil producers to a greater
dependence on refiners abroad.
"We are going to be importing more products," Mr. Murphy of the American
Petroleum Institute said. "That is a certainty if we don't expand our
capacity. But the problem there is that you've changed one form of
dependency for another."
Barnaby J. Feder contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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The Entire Community Is Now a Toxic Waste Dump
By Rebecca Clarren
Salon.com
Friday 09 September 2005
The Gulf Coast is drowning in a poisonous stew, people are dying from
waterborne bacteria, and federal funds have been drained by years of pro-
industry policies. Katrina is one of the worst environmental catastrophes
in US history.
From 500 feet in the air, Chris Wells, a geographer with the US
Geological Survey, looked with dismay on the landscape pounded and then
abandoned by Hurricane Katrina. As Wells flew on Wednesday above the
Louisiana coastline, across New Orleans, the marshlands south of the
city, and over Mississippi, nearly every tree was snapped, their limbs
twisted around in a braid, the bark shredded right off the trunk. The
marshland below looked as though somebody had taken a spatula and scraped
away the marsh grasses, leaving a sea of mud. Aside from a number of
shorebirds, and one 8-foot alligator swimming about 20 miles offshore,
Wells saw no wildlife. What he did see were streaks of oil, some miles
long and 200 yards wide.
"It was on any body of water of any significance," he says. Hundreds
of thousands of inland acres are covered with a spotty sheen of oil. "The
landscape right now is absolutely bizarre and unreal", Wells says, from
his home in Lafayette, La. "It's emotionally draining. Even if nobody was
hurt, it's heartbreaking to see what has happened to the environment."
Wells suspects that much of the oil has drained from thousands of
boats lying at the bottom of countless bayous, canals, and the ocean.
Within the impacted area are at least 2,200 underground fuel tanks, many
potentially ruptured, says Rodney Mallett, spokesperson for the Louisiana
Department of Environmental Quality. Officials also predict that
thousands of cars, lawn mowers and weed-eaters are also submerged,
leaking gas and oil into the waterways.
In addition, tens of thousands of barrels of oil have spilled from
refineries and drilling rigs in at least 13 sites between Lake
Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. Along the coast, Katrina damaged 58
drilling rigs and platforms in the Gulf, according to Rigzone.com, an oil
and gas industry Web site. At least one rig has sunk and another was
swept 66 miles through the gulf before washing up on Dauphin Island. It
remains unclear how badly the hundreds of underwater pipelines connecting
the oil to shore have been damaged.
Yet the destruction that Wells witnessed from the sky is only the
most visible element of a poisonous stew bubbling in Katrina's wake. On
Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that bacteria in
the water flooding Gulf Coast areas are at 10 times the agency's standard
for human health, and already four people have died from waterborne bacteria.
Although the samples are from flooded neighborhoods and not heavily
industrialized zones, officials predict that the impact zone's water is
laced with a slew of toxic chemicals such as lead, PCBs and herbicides.
This sludge will eventually settle onto the soil and filter into the
groundwater below, says Gina Solomon, M.D., a senior scientist at the
Natural Resources Defense Council. While it may be too early to predict
the levels of total contamination, many of these chemicals are known to
cause cancer, birth defects or neurological problems.
With human life still hanging in the balance and people desperate for
food, water and shelter, public officials have understandably placed the
environment in the back seat of priorities.
Yet it's become apparent that federal and state agencies had no plans
in place to deal with the environmental impact of the storm and are now
scrambling to know where to even begin to address the catastrophe. What's
also become clear is that Superfund, the federal till for environmental
cleanup, notably for Louisiana and Mississippi, has run dry, due in large
part to anti-tax and anti-regulation policies favorable to oil and
chemical industries.
"Chemical spills that would normally seem horrible on their own are
dwarfed by the huge scale of this disaster," says Solomon. "Right now,
people quite rightly are focusing on getting food and water and shelter
for the victims, but the environmental mess and contamination could haunt
this area for many years to come."
Aside from oil spills, the list of other potentially toxic
ingredients in the water drags on and on. The floodwaters in Louisiana
alone have hit nearly 160,000 homes, most stocking shelves of household
cleaning products. In piles of debris as wide as three miles along the
Mississippi coast, lead paint and asbestos cling to the remnants of old
buildings.
Louis Skrmetta runs a family business started by his grandfather in
the 1920s, sailing tourists out to Gulf Islands National Seashore. He
weathered Katrina in the back bay of Biloxi in his boat, with about 500
other ships, all trying to take shelter from the storm. Now, the 400
shrimp boats, yachts, and workboats that survived the storm are all
crammed into a bayou 250 feet wide and quarter-mile long, and it's not a
pretty sight.
"All I see is filthy nasty brown water," Skrmetta says. "Everyone is
dumping raw sewage overboard. And this is only boats from the Gulfport
area. I would imagine that every city along the coast has the same
situation. It's going to be a nightmare."
In addition to raw sewage flowing from what are now makeshift
houseboats, the EPA estimates that the more than 200 sewage treatment
facilities in the impact zone are nearly all out of order, causing
backed-up sewage to leak. Test results released Sept. 7 found that levels
of E. coli greatly exceed the EPA's recommended levels. Already countless
people are suffering from diarrhea. Vibrio vulnificus, a gastrointestinal
organism found in the gulf's shellfish, has killed one person in Texas
and three in Mississippi. Those victims had open cuts or wounds that came
in contact with bacteria-laden salt water, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC is also concerned about outbreaks of leptospirosis, a
bacterial illness carried by farm animals, causing anything from high
fever and headaches to kidney damage and liver failure. Humans contract
the disease by exposure to water contaminated with the animals' urine.
For those living in shelters, the agency anticipates higher rates of
infectious illness. "To what extent we see any outbreaks of illness
depends on if people are evacuated and provided with medical care," says
CDC spokesperson Tom Skinner. "It's really important for people to leave
the area if possible."
In an effort to drain New Orleans and rid it of the bacteria-laden
water, the Army Corps of Engineers has begun pumping floodwater into Lake
Pontchartrain, the huge but shallow lake on the city's northern border.
Yet this water, as it recedes past New Orleans' highly polluted areas, is
most likely laced with a frightening amount of dangerous chemicals.
From 1941 to 1986 the Thompson-Hayward Chemical Plant, near Xavier
University in the center of town, packaged and mixed pesticides such as
DDT, the herbicide 2,4,5-T (the main constituent of Agent Orange, which
contains dioxin), and the fungicide pentachlorophenal, which also
contains dioxin. While the city and federal governments launched a
massive cleanup effort throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the remediation
was not entirely successful: 2,600 tons of herbicide-contaminated soil
reportedly couldn't be removed because it was too toxic to legally
dispose of in any state, according to a 1995 article by Mark Schleifstein
in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
At the Agriculture Street Landfill, soil and debris are laden with
DDT, lead, asbestos, and industrial waste - ironically, everything that
was scraped from the city floor after Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965. In
1962, reports Solid Waste and Recycling magazine, "300,000 cubic yards of
excess fill were removed from ASL because of ongoing subsurface fires.
(The site was nicknamed 'Dante's Inferno' because of the fires.)" While
the EPA eventually declared the dump a Superfund site (after the city had
filled the area and built homes and a school above the infill of trash),
the only cleanup the landfill underwent was the removal 5 inches of soil.
A plastic barrier was put down and clean soil thrown on top.
"The New Orleans area that was flooded was an industrial area where
you have all the lubricants and batteries and heavy-metal plating - it's
just hideously dangerous," says geographer Wells. "We can't wait around
to test the floodwater before we pump it back into the lake - people are
already dying of disease from it - but it's a terrible thing to do. We're
going to avoid a great human disaster by doing this, but we could be
creating a damn big environmental one." Forget for a moment the scenario
of a toxic lake in the middle of a major American city; should a future
hurricane breach the levees again, New Orleans could literally be
submerged in poison.
Aside from potentially poisonous floodwaters, the hurricane likely
roiled sediment from the bottoms of the lake and its surrounding canals,
sediment that is the toxic legacy of the region's century-old romance
with the chemical industry. William Fontenot, recently retired, spent 27
years working for the Louisiana attorney general's office, helping
citizens grapple with environmental problems. His voice weary, Fontenot
describes a few of the various companies that spent much of the past
century dumping waste into Louisiana's waterways.
For 100 years, one such company, American Creosote, situated on the
north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, near Slidell, treated wood to create
railroad ties. In the 1970s, a fire ruptured a tank and creosote spilled
onto the property and into the Mississippi River. After Coast Guard
divers took sediment samples that were 8 percent creosote, the site
landed on the Superfund list in 1983. Although the EPA cleaned up the
property and 1,200 feet of the river, it ignored the other 6,000 feet of
waterway that was devoid of any living organisms.
During the 1970s in Ponchatoula, north of the lake, the Ponchatoula
Battery Co. dumped between 3 and 5 million spent lead-acid battery cases
onto the ground. The waste liquid acid was directed into holding ponds
that had no containment structures. Drainage with pH levels (the acidic
rate) high enough to burn the skin off a person's hand bled from the
facility into various ditches into Selser's Creek. This mess was also
declared a Superfund site, but, says Fontenot, "when they ran out of
Superfund money, the cleanup just stopped. The EPA and the state of
Louisiana don't want to put too much burden on industry to clean this
stuff up". He continues: "Just normal to a little rainfall has an effect
on all these sites. Just the sun shining on them affects them. How do you
think the storm affects all this?"
Citizens in Mississippi fear that burying toxic secrets is standard
operating procedure. Clinging to the north shore of Bay St. Louis, an
inlet just west of Gulfport that flows into the Gulf of Mexico, the
DuPont DeLisle plant, the country's second-largest titanium dioxide
maker, was slammed by Katrina. The facility produces 14 million pounds of
toxic waste per year, some of which is kept at on-site landfills. From
1999 to 2003, the most recent figures available, 2.3 million pounds of
the waste were planted in the company's landfill.
DuPont also operates four underground injection wells, which shoot
toxic waste into the earth at a depth of around two miles. In late August
this year, a jury awarded $1.5 million to the first of nearly 2,000 local
plaintiffs who claimed that dioxins from DuPont, released into the nearby
air and water, caused their cancers.
Hurricane Katrina's storm surge overflowed DuPont's 25-foot-high
levee, and the site was buried under 7 to 9 feet of water. According to
the federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, a leaking
pipe (now repaired) released a pound of chlorine gas, and rail cars
containing coke, ore and chloride were tossed on their side. Despite this
storm surge - the same one that flattened most of the bay - DuPont claims
that not a drop of toxic waste escaped its on-site landfills. "Our
current assessment is that damage to the plant did not affect the
environment and community due to the storm surge," the company said in a
statement to its employees.
"It's ridiculous for DuPont to claim that," says Becky Gillette, a
Sierra Club organizer in Ocean Springs, Miss., in an e-mail. "What planet
are they from? It is very distressing to think of all the poor people
going to destroyed or flooded houses, cleaning them out, their kids in
tow, without a clue about the poisons they may be exposed to in the cleanup".
Before Tuesday, no state or federal agency had been out to the DuPont
site, according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality
(the agency and the EPA have since visited the facility). "When industry
has a major release, they have to notify us, and they haven't done that,
so we can assume they've had no major problems down there," says Robbie
Wilbur, the agency's public affairs specialist. "In general, I haven't
heard of any major environmental problems, but a lot of facilities
couldn't even get to them if they wanted. There's too much debris."
Although the Chevron Oil Refinery, at Pascagoula, Miss., which
processes 325,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is also underwater, Wilbur
says that Chevron has been "taking on a lot of responsibility
themselves." As of Tuesday, the state environmental agency had yet to
conduct water- or air-quality tests anywhere in the region. Wilbur says
he doesn't know of any other state or federal task force working on the
state's environmental problems or cleanup.
Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality, on the other hand,
began to document oil leaks the day after Katrina. They took water
samples earlier this week that they expect back any day. They're working
with the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers on a plan to treat sludge
after the water subsides. One preliminary idea is to treat the toxic soil
and use it to rebuild the coast.
Despite the variety of plans, the agency is overwhelmed, says
communications director Rodney Mallett, a native of Louisiana. "I have no
idea about how many oil refineries are impacted. I don't know about the
Superfund sites. This is something like no one has ever seen. Nobody ever
planned for anything like this."
The EPA has no estimates on how long recovery will take because it
doesn't have a full picture of the environmental impact. Only three of
New Orleans' 148 pumps are currently working, and it could take 80 days
before the floodwaters drain from the city and its outlying suburbs into
Lake Pontchartrain. Only then, following water and soil quality tests,
can a comprehensive cleanup picture emerge.
Yet finding money to clean up the environmental contamination won't
be easy. The Superfund bank account, money that would normally be used to
pay for cleaning up hazardous waste sites that are "an act of God", is
essentially broke. The tax on chemical and oil industries that pays for
Superfund cleanups expired in December 1995. According to the most recent
statistics, a 1998 report by the US Public Interest Research Group, an
environmental and health advocacy agency, $4 million for cleaning up
hazardous waste sites goes uncollected every day the tax is not restored.
In fact, every year for the past decade congressional representatives
have attempted to reauthorize the polluter payments, and every year the
bill has been voted down. The Bush administration has consistently
opposed the fee. Without the inflow of industry's money, taxpayers have
instead funded the Superfund budget. Today, most of the $1.2 billion
currently appropriated from the general revenue fund has already been
committed to other sites around the country.
"The Superfund is supposed to be our safety net when Mother Nature is
at fault," says Lois Gibbs, director of the Center for Health,
Environment and Justice, a nonprofit group based in Falls Church, Va.
"These fees could make a large dent in the costs of cleanup." Gibbs poses
the question that geographer Wells also asked, one that the nation will
likely spend the next several years trying to answer. "The entire
community is now a hazardous waste dump. How do you clean up an entire
city, an entire region"?
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Oil spillages spread through Mississippi wetlands
By Henry Hamman in Sewanee, Tennessee,
and Carola Hoyos in Chalmette, Louisiana
Financial Times
September 8, 2005
Oil storage tanks ruptured by Hurricane Katrina may have dumped as much
as 3.7m gallons of crude oil into the Lower Mississippi River and
surrounding wetlands, threatening widespread damage to the environment.
Officials estimate the spillage is roughly a third of the size of the
huge slick caused when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in
1989. Last night experts said the damage caused by the spillage would be
severe in the short term but were hopeful there would be few long-term
effects. Some of the oil is expected to find its way into the Gulf of
Mexico.
Frank Manheim, an associate professor at George Mason University, and a
former geochemist at the US Geological Survey, said the environmental
impact "probably will not be very long lasting". But officials at the
Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality remain cautious because it
is difficult to gain access to the area, which is accessible only by
water. Also, it is unclear how much oil has been lost.
The largest spill believed to be about 3.3m gallons of crude oil
happened after two 80,000-barrel storage tanks ruptured at a Bass
Enterprises Production site at Cox Bay, Louisiana, which is just above
the mouth of the river.
It is understood the tanks were not full at the time of the rupture.
Nevertheless, officials estimate the spill could be as big as a 1969
incident following a blowout at an offshore well near Santa Barbara,
California. That accident is widely seen as a seminal moment in the
development of the US environmental movement.
The second spill at the Murphy Oil Corporation refinery at Meraux,
Louisiana is thought by state officials to have released 420,000 gallons
of crude into a flooded area around the refinery.
The Murphy spill was discovered by aerial surveillance a few days ago.
The Coast Guard, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and a
clean-up contractor are working at the site to contain the oil. Eric
Olsen, a spokesman for the National Resources Defense Council, said the
environmental group was attempting to monitor the clean-up and remained
concerned about possible threats to drinking water in the area.
Meanwhile, concern is mounting over the pumping of polluted water from
New Orleans into Lake Ponchartrain. It is expected to cause significant
short-term environmental damage, including killing fish.
Experts said the lake and river estuary should not suffer significant
long-term damage. But Dwight Bradshaw, a senior environmental scientist
with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, warned that the
flood water could be polluted with "things that are serious that we
don't know about."
These included pesticides and toxic chemicals from trucks and barges.
"These could be a big concern," he said.
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Exxon says several weeks to assess Chalmette Refinery damage
Wed. September 7, 2005
Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - An Exxon Mobil Corp. spokeswoman said on
Wednesday it will take "several weeks to assess the situation" at its
joint-venture 190,000 barrels-per-day Chalmette, Louisiana, refinery shut
by Hurricane Katrina.
The Chalmette LLC plant, owned 50-50 by Exxon and Venezuelan state oil
company PDVSA, does not yet have power, said Betsy Eaton, Exxon spokeswoman.
"People are on the ground assessing the situation," said Eaton. "It will
take several weeks to asses the situation. When the assessment is
completed, then we will be in a better position to say when the refinery
will begin its operations."
The assessment began on Tuesday, when Exxon Mobil said that the refinery
was "in better condition than we originally thought".
The Chalmette plant is one of four refineries that have the oil industry
concerned because there is no solid information of when they will return
and vague reports that the term could be months.
These plants are the four that were hit by the most violent winds and
storm surge caused by Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Louisiana and
Mississippi coasts on August 29.
The three other refineries that oil trading sources say may be out for
weeks and possibly months are the 325,000-bpd Chevron refinery in
Pascagoula, Mississippi, the 247,000-bpd ConocoPhillips refinery in Belle
Chasse, Louisiana, and the 120,000-bpd Murphy Oil Corp. refinery in
Meraux, Louisiana.
The EIA said on Wednesday that 900,000 bpd production on the Gulf Coast
will still be out by the end of September under a "medium recovery" scenario.
© Reuters 2005. All rights reserved.
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New Orleans' toxic tide
Chemicals leaking from cars and factories will cause one of costliest environmental cleanups ever.
By Brad Knickerbocker and Patrik Jonsson
Cristian Science Monitor
September 08, 2005
NEW ORLEANS – Despite the stench - and the pair of pants, bottle of hair spray, and plastic oil cans that float by - Kenneth Economy wades barefoot into New Orleans's fetid brown floodwater.
He has no choice, like so many locals trying to right this wronged city. He is trying to restart the motor of a flat-bottomed boat as he and friends work to rescue people and animals out of their neighborhood. Those floodwaters, which have already destroyed an estimated 140,000 to 160,000 homes, now pose a new challenge.
As engineers began pumping out the Big Easy this week, creating small but visible wakes of water behind street signs and tree trunks, the water they're moving carries a volatile mix of everything imaginable - from household paints, deodorants, and old car batteries to railroad tank cars, sewage treatment plants, and landfills. While state officials stop short of calling it a toxic soup, at least so far, federal environmental officials call it catastrophic.
Breaks in the weather, nature's resilience, and engineering ingenuity could mitigate the size and scope of the problem, as they have with some previous natural disasters. But the environmental cleanup will be one of the nation's largest ever, experts say.
"This is an unprecedented mess for the US in recent history, and it seems to be certainly affecting many more people than prior US natural disasters," says Robert Pitt, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Alabama.
Even discounting the area's unique geology and hydrology, officials and other experts say they're dealing with uncharted waters. "If we had never had a levee breach, we still would have had a tremendous amount of water in these sub-basins," says Don Basham, engineering construction chief for the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Meanwhile, a warehouse explosion along the river in New Orleans and an oil spill several days after the hurricane passed through have added to the challenge. "Everywhere we look there's a spill," said Mike McDaniel, secretary of Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality, in the state's first major assessment of hurricane Katrina's environmental impact. "There's almost a solid sheen over the area right now."
While officials won't know the full extent of the problem until the floodwaters recede - and probably not until weeks or months after that - they do know that the cleanup of what has become an enormous chemical cesspool will be one of the costliest ever. The US Army Corps of Engineers figures that just cleaning up millions of tons of debris - shattered buildings (some with lead paint or asbestos), washed-out motor vehicles, the sodden detritus of private life and commerce - will cost $1.5 billion.
For now, some environmental regulations are being waived in order to address immediate problems. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality issued the naval base in Chalmette a variance so it could burn debris, mostly food that spoiled after losing power. The US Environmental Protection Agency has waived the need for Clean Water Act permits to allow the pumping of polluted water out of New Orleans into Lake Pontchartrain.
US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt has declared a public health emergency in five states: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. There's no telling when wastewater treatment and other sanitary facilities will become functional. More than 500 sewage plants were damaged or destroyed in Louisiana, including 25 major ones.
But officials say there have not been any outbreaks of infectious diseases. "We are one week out, and so far, so good," says Mr. Leavitt, who toured the area over the Labor Day weekend. The key here is evacuation of people to safer and cleaner locations.
"In most cases, when the remaining population is removed, most of the main threat [from contaminated water] should decrease," says professor Pitt. But he adds that such toxicants as petroleum products, paints, and acids "are much more persistent and may leave a residue of problems after the water recedes, especially in some areas."
At the moment, the Army Corps and other state and federal agencies are concentrating on pumping water from flooded New Orleans, which sits in a bowl-shaped area below sea level. The effort commenced on Monday. By Tuesday, the city's Pump No. 6, one of the world's largest pump stations, joined two others to get the water out.
Draining the city will take up to 80 days, officials say, at which point the remaining sludge can be analyzed for toxic pollutants. Given the area's hot, humid climate there will be mildew, mold, fungus, and disease-carrying mosquitoes to deal with as well.
The water being pumped into Lake Pontchartrain will eventually flow into the Gulf of Mexico. But the pace at which that happens depends on natural processes - winds, future rainfall, cold fronts - that are difficult to predict and impossible to manipulate.
"The water does circulate out of the basin eventually," says Al Naomi, senior project manager for the New Orleans district of the US Army Corps of Engineers. "But it depends a lot on meteorological conditions, which we really don't have much control or much knowledge of, at least not here."
Beyond the immediate environmental impact of Katrina, the hurricane and its aftermath could have widespread and long-range effects as well. The Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida has a concentration of petroleum and chemical plants. Many of these are in or near low-income, largely African-American communities where the "environmental justice" movement has grown and spread. Off the coast of Louisiana is the 12,000 square-mile "Dead Zone," an area very low in oxygen due largely to excess nutrients tied to agricultural chemicals used in the Mississippi River basin.
It's possible that today's new environmental challenges in the region could exacerbate those situations. But nobody can be sure.
"We're starting into territory where nobody's tread before as far as cleanup and remediation is concerned," says Darryl Malek Wiley of the Sierra Club's office in New Orleans. "There's more questions than answers."
For shell-shocked New Orleanians, however, the looming environmental emergency pales in comparison to the arduous task of piecing their lives back together.
Mickey Gilliard barely escaped the floodwaters, but, on Tuesday, his boss called him back to work. An employee of the Jefferson Parish Drainage Department, he is one of hundreds of locals working with Corps of Engineers to stem breached levees and fix downed pumps.
"The waters are horrible," he says, pointing to a half-submerged oil barrel lying in the 17th Street Canal, clearly leaking a dark fluid. "All we can do is to try to start pumping it into the lake and into the river."
Patrik Jonsson reported from New Orleans. Material from Reuters was used in this story.
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Katrina Stirs Up Oily Nightmare
CHALMETTE, La., Sept. 7, 2005
CBS News
"There's nobody who can come back here and live in a house, nowhere in this parish."
St. Bernard Parish president Henry Rodriguez, Jr.
St. Bernard Parish is classic south Louisiana, with beautiful marshes and estuaries -- and oil refineries.
As The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith reports, the parish has been virtually inaccessible for days, with what really is the worst case, absolute nightmare scenario: a natural disaster made worse by an oil spill.
Street after street in St. Bernard Parish is covered in oil sludge.
Smith describes it as "a stinky, grotesque goo," created when heavy crude from a local refinery mixed in with the enormous storm surge from Hurricane Katrina.
"Everything this stuff touches is contaminated," Smith observes.
Dr. Ryan Truxillo can't believe what's happened to his old neighborhood, calling it "surreal. This is something you see happens to other people, nameless people, on TV. This doesn't happen in your neighborhood or your backyard."
The contaminated area covers two-to-four square miles of residential neighborhoods in Chalmette.
Benzene in the crude is a carcinogen, dangerous whether you touch it or breathe it.
The toxic cocktail that drenched Chalmette means these neighborhoods will probably have to flattened.
"There is no housing" there anymore, declares Larry Ingargiola, who heads emergency management in the parish.
"There is no housing," echoes parish president Henry Rodriguez Jr. "There's nobody who can come back here and live in a house, nowhere in this parish."
"These men have a problem," Smith remarks, "and it didn't help matters much that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) took a week to show up."
What's the message Ingargiola and Rodriguez have for FEMA chief Michael Brown?
Says Ingargiola: "We were left alone. We need your help now. We're not gonna bitch with you or do anything like that. We need your help. We don't bite (the hand) that's feedin' you right now."
Rodriguez asserts, "Our federal government can't be incompetent and stupid all at one time," says the other. "You got to know we got problems down here."
Brown showed up Tuesday and, while there were plenty of smiles and handshakes, Rodriguez wasn't afraid to throw up a few expletives to make his point, exclaiming, "I don't want 'em hijacking none of my (beep) money. That's why I'm here."
FEMA, says Smith, is a four-letter word in south Louisiana. Many folks here feel, if it didn't work, its Brown's fault.
Asked pointblank by Smith if he "screwed this up," Brown responded, "No. No."
And what if an investigation finds things weren't done right, who'd he accountable?
"That's what the investigation will find out. That's what the investigation will tell us."
St. Bernard Parish needs some federal grease to help clean up the slick in its backyard.
But, Smith adds, no one here is bad mouthing oil: Oil means jobs and frankly, the folks down here feel like they do a lot of the dirty work for a country that can't live without its products.
It's summed up by Rodriguez, who says, "They're gonna come help us because of this. Oil."
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