Key air monitors offline after Laura hits Louisiana gas hub
Smoke rises from a burning chemical plant after the passing of Hurricane Laura in Lake Charles, Louisiana on August 27, 2020. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
Hazardous emissions from a chlorine plant fire, abruptly shuttered oil and gas refineries and still-to-be assessed plant damage are seeping into the air after Hurricane Laura, regulators say, but some key state and federal monitors to alert the public of air dangers remain offline in Louisiana.
While the chlorine fire was being monitored as a potential health threat, Louisiana environmental spokesman Greg Langley says he knows of no other major industrial health risks from the storm in the state. He said restoring power and water was a bigger priority.
But some Louisiana residents and environmental advocates say the lack of solid government information on the state of the air is typical. With dozens of petroleum, petrochemical, and other industrial sites, Louisiana is home to communities with some of the nation's highest cancer risks, according to Environmental Protection Agency rankings.
In the Lake Charles area, with refineries, a major natural gas project, and other industrial sites, residents "generally don't get any information except what the industry puts out," said Carla Chrisco, a Lake Charles lawyer who evacuated the city before Laura.
The area was among the hardest hit Thursday. Laura struck parts of the Texas-Louisiana coast with up to 150-mph (240 kph) winds and a storm surge that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said rose as high as 15 feet (4.5 meters).
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An electrical outage that deprived hundreds of thousands of people of power and is expected to last weeks has knocked offline the state's stationary air monitors in the storm-battered communities.
Oil and gas facilities that the U.S. Department of Energy says account for 13% of U.S. refinery capacity shut down as a precaution along an industrialized roughly 60-mile stretch from Port Arthur, Texas, to Lake Charles before the hurricane.
The abrupt shutdowns, and eventual restarts, for hurricanes typically mean the emission of up to millions of pounds of additional cancer-causing soot, heavy metals, and other hazards from refinery smokestacks.
A fire at a plant making swimming pool chemicals in Westlake, part of the larger Lake Charles area, since Thursday has on a few occasions sent enough chlorine into the air to be detected by emergency workers' hand-held monitors, Langley said. Chlorine levels were not high enough to warrant evacuation, officials said, although residents of the industrial area around the plant were under orders to shelter inside their homes for days after Laura's landfall.
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With debris clogging roads, the industry still is assessing damage along the Texas-Louisiana coast. No word of any major industrial threat other than the chlorine plant fire had emerged by three days after Laura. After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, confirmation of more than a hundred toxic spills into the air, land, and water took days, weeks, and months to become public, and many were never investigated.
"In a storm of this magnitude, there's going to be some leaks, there's going to be some spills," Langley said Saturday. "We're still in the process of assessing that. I don't know of anything personally that's major."
Texas has requested the EPA's help overall looking for any so-far undiscovered hazardous air releases after the hurricane, but Louisiana, with the exception of the chlorine plant fire, has not, EPA spokesman James Hewitt said.
"EPA stands ready to assist states and local governments who need help, and have already done so following Hurricane Laura," Hewitt said in an email.
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Texas made a formal request for air-monitoring help through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Hewitt said. As a result, EPA has sent a bus-mounted mobile lab to the Houston-area to start monitoring and assessing air for any hazardous emission levels, he said.
"Information will be provided to the public as it becomes available which follows our standard procedures," he said.
By Saturday, EPA contractors had left the area of the chlorine plant fire, said Langley, the Louisiana environmental spokesman. An environmental consulting firm would continue to do all air monitoring, he said.
State officials also would be flying over the damaged area to look for obvious leaks, sheens, wayward metal drums, and any other signs of industrial threats, Langley said. "We have a lot of experience in hurricane response, looking for that," he said.
But some environmental and public health advocates single out Louisiana for what they say is too lax vigilance over industrial threats to the public, even in the best of times.
Louisiana's response since Laura "sounds like it's about what it usually is. Not robust is putting it kindly," said Anne Rolfes in New Orleans, founder of The Bucket Brigades, a Louisiana environmental group.
People are worried about the possibility of toxic releases from the storm, Rolfes said. But over the years, she said, Louisiana residents have come to have "tremendously low expectations, for these institutions that are supposed to be protecting us."