Petrochemicals Fires
This is what it looks like trying to put out the fires of hell with a garden hose.
Deer Park abuts Houston to the east. It started in one tank about 10:30 pm last night and spread to 8 tanks overnight. They closed area schools and told residents to shelter in place. No injuries are reported.
They are containing the fires and letting them just burn out. Depending on the winds, we’re going to have some nasty air for a few days.
And they want to build a place like that down in Port Aransas.
1Hard to imagine a solar plant or wind farms doing this damage.
2They learned nothing from the explosion at West.
Texas is open for Bidness.
3Wide open.
Legs spread.
I remember watching something that looked like that…Texas City 1947
4I remember watching something like that from a much closer vantage point than shown in the picture, March 23rd 2005, also in Texas City.
5For someone who hasn’t witnessed a large hydrocarbon-accelerated fire, video can’t convey the heat and deafening roar. I ran like a scalded dog. The folks fighting and containing that fire in Deer Park are the ones who run TO the fire. They’re in my thoughts, and I hope they all keep going home to their families.
I grew up in the refinery district south of Philly. Best hopes to everyone near those fires and everyone trying to deal with them.
6The SA local 10PM TV weatherman had a satellite IR loop that showed the nasty black smoke plume from Deer Park stretching all the way to south of Austin, near San Marcos/Buda, and beyond. The low level wind was flowing ESE, carrying the smoke westerly, while the upper levels of cirrus were out of the SW.
7.
P.P., I sometimes worked in Texas City, Deer Park, and many other places around that area (Pasadena, Galv, Alvin, ClLk, etcetc, along with most everywhere else in TX).
The very solid and secure building near downtown Texas City I was in actually still had signs of damage outside from the 1947 explosion(s) and fires (as pointed out by the locals); that building core dated from long before 1947. A guy I worked with in Lake Jackson was injured slightly back then, when a toddler, by flying glass at home in Galveston, his nurse mom was very busy at that time.
In Deer Park, working about 10 blocks south of 225 on the main street, when the refineries just north of 225 were flaring off, the noise and light was incredible, and you could feel the heat quite strongly; like I imagine being way too close to a rocket launch pad would be, except it just stays there. Some nice residential areas in Deer Park, never could figure out why anybody would want to live there though.
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Mike, Are you sure about ‘somebody’ building a plant/refinery in “Port Aransas”, not maybe Aransas Pass? PA is wholly tourist territory on a barrier island, not very amenable to industrial development, except maybe adding to Harbor Island across the CC channel which is part of AP, not PA (I’m familiar with the waters adjacent to these places too).
Aransas Pass and the surrounding mainland areas towards Corpus Christi (Gregory, Portland, Ingleside, etc) along CC Bay have a lot of oil, chemical, and metal industries.
As a retired refinery worker (and volunteer firefighter), I learned early that the only thing they can do with large tank fires is to let them burn out. I don’t care how much fire retardant and water they pour on the fires, there’s too much fuel in ONE tank much less eight, to be extinguished.
I don’t care what they tell the public about firefighting efforts, they can’t extinguish the fires.
8Donna: West Fertilizer in 2013.
9FFF! (F Fossil Fuels) can I say that? For me the biggest takeaway is the lack of regulation in the chemical/oil industry. ITC has been fined every year for decades for emissions and dumping. TCEQ is bogus.
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