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The perils of deregulation

Crovax said:
There were 3 separate back up power units along with refrigerated trucks at the chemical plant
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Look. This is about complaining about Trump and not about anything else. But it is something to think about. How do we secure our plants more effectively and less expensively.
 
joG said:
Look. This is about complaining about Trump and not about anything else. But it is something to think about. How do we secure our plants more effectively and less expensively.
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Zoning laws of course
 
katzgar said:
lets not forget about having to rescue people from houses built in bottom lands.
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Evacuations before the storm would have prevented most of that. Not all, obviously, because you can't make people leave, but most of it.
 
Rogue Valley said:
An Obama Executive Order would have required Arkema to relocate their emergency generators significantly higher. Trump rescinded that EO a month ago.
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Obviously, the Obama EO was useless for two reasons: 1) an EO isn't law and Arkema wouldn't have been legally required to to jack**** and 2) if they were legally required to do something, if it wasn't done by as late as a month ago, it wouldn't have made any difference by the time of Hurricane Harvey's landfall.
 
joG said:
Look. This is about complaining about Trump and not about anything else. But it is something to think about. How do we secure our plants more effectively and less expensively.
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We can try to do so, but at the same time there's no way to plan for and anticipate every single possibility.
 
apdst said:
Evacuations before the storm would have prevented most of that. Not all, obviously, because you can't make people leave, but most of it.
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The problem with Houston is the metro area is 7 million people there aren't enough roads you would have had a bunch of stall cars with drown people in flood water in the end
 
katzgar said:
The problem with Houston is the metro area is 7 million people there aren't enough roads you would have had a bunch of stall cars with drown people in flood water in the end
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Yet, you complain that people were trapped by the storm. It's assinine to complain that people were trapped, then claim that evacuations ahead of the storm are unrealistic.
 
Texas in action.

All that effort didn’t prevent multiple failures in response to the fatal leak at the former DuPont plant, where four workers died in November 2014.

The company’s emergency vehicles broke down.

City firefighters didn’t have enough oxygen for a sustained rescue effort.

The 911 caller from DuPont couldn’t identify what chemical was leaking, but that didn’t stop him from saying that there was no harm to the public.

Chemical Breakdown part 3 | Chemical Breakdown - Houston Chronicle
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:doh
 
apdst said:
Yet, you complain that people were trapped by the storm. It's assinine to complain that people were trapped, then claim that evacuations ahead of the storm are unrealistic.
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nope, never complained at all, you are making crap up
 
apdst said:
Evacuations before the storm would have prevented most of that. Not all, obviously, because you can't make people leave, but most of it.
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As you've been told repeatedly over the past week, there are only two highways out of Houston: I-10 and I-45; and only two directions to go which would have done anyone any good to avoid the storm. So, 5-7 million people would have piled onto either I-10 W or I-45 N.

How far do you think they would have gotten before the storm hit full-on?
 
calamity said:
As you've been told repeatedly over the past week, there are only two highways out of Houston: I-10 and I-45; and only two directions to go which would have done anyone any good to avoid the storm. So, 5-7 million people would have piled onto either I-10 W or I-45 N.

How far do you think they would have gotten before the storm hit full-on?
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Only two highways of Houston? You need to buy a map. :lamo

This is going to be fun, for a loooooong time! :lamo
 
calamity said:
As you've been told repeatedly over the past week, there are only two highways out of Houston: I-10 and I-45; and only two directions to go which would have done anyone any good to avoid the storm. So, 5-7 million people would have piled onto either I-10 W or I-45 N.

How far do you think they would have gotten before the storm hit full-on?
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Here's something to brag about. :lamo

https://www.google.com/amp/www.brei...rvice-says-houston-mayor-new-evacuations/amp/
 
apdst said:
Only two highways of Houston? You need to buy a map. :lamo

This is going to be fun, for a loooooong time! :lamo
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I-10 and I-45. Got more? Two lane roads and four lane highways that end less than 50 miles away from the city center do not count.

Let's see them.
 
calamity said:
I-10 and I-45. Got more? Two lane roads and four lane highways that end less than 30 miles away from the city center do not count.

Let's see them.
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Hwy 59 N. I-10 E. Hwy 290 W. Hwy 90 E. Hwy 90 Alt W. Once out of town those roads branch off into other highways.

Then there was the Houston airport. Before the storm, not during the storm as some folks have idiotically suggested would happen. That's just stupid.

Like I said, obviously not everyone would be evacuated, but every person evacuated is one person trapped by the storm.
 
apdst said:
Hwy 59 N. I-10 E. Hwy 290 W. Hwy 90 E. Hwy 90 Alt W. Once out of town those roads branch off into other highways.

Then there was the Houston airport. Before the storm, not during the storm as some folks have idiotically suggested would happen. That's just stupid.

Like I said, obviously not everyone would be evacuated, but every person evacuated is one person trapped by the storm.
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I-10 E isn't going to help because it would just take you deeper into the storm unless you made it to Baton Rouge, which is not likely unless you were the first car on the road. And, I certainly would not put much faith in those smaller state highways, which probably cannot handle more than 10,000 vehicles a day before being clogged like a constipated old man who ran out of prune juice.
 
katzgar said:
Apparently you don't know what a generator does.
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I do know what a generator is. As I do know that 6 feet of water swamped those generators, basically shorting them out and unable to deliver the needed electricity needed for cooling the volatile chemicals.

Truckstop said:
Oh we are all going to bear the costs of those companies doing it on the cheap.
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I wouldn't call the efforts that the company went through and complied with as 'doing it on the cheap'. Cite your reference that they were 'doing it on the cheap'.

But the power went out, and then the floodwaters came and knocked out the plant’s generators. A liquid nitrogen system faltered. In a last-ditch move, the workers transferred the chemicals to nine huge refrigerated trucks, each with its own generator, and moved the vehicles to a remote section of the plant.
That was doomed to fail, too. Six feet of water swamped the trucks, and the final 11 workers gave up. At 2 a.m. Tuesday, they called for a water evacuation and left the plant to its fate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...c91098-8e7a-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html
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I applaud the decision from management to move the chemicals to refrigeration trucks, trying to same both the plant and the day. Unfortunately the storm and water inundation was too much for even these measures.

calamity said:
Regulations like requiring back-up power or buffering agents on site which could neutralize the volatile chemicals would be a bear minimum. But, since Texas doesn't believe in regulations, they have lots of chemical accidents and explosions. But, profits are up. Woo-hoo!
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More uninformed hyper-partisan blather, as is typical from you. The plant was in fact equipped with back-up power generation. 6 feet of water inundation disabled them, probably shorted them out.

Moot said:
Whose idea was it to allow chemical companies not to disclose what chemicals they store on site?

Whose idea was it to allow developers to build homes near those chemical plants?
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Site your reference that the company didn't disclose what chemicals they store on site.

I don't see a whole lot of residential close by.

plant.jpg

Arkema SA expects chemicals to catch fire or explode at its heavily flooded plant in Crosby, Texas in the coming days, and has no way to prevent that from happening, the chief executive officer of the company's North America unit said on Wednesday.
The company evacuated remaining workers on Tuesday and Harris County ordered the evacuation of residents in a 1.5-mile radius of the plant that makes organic chemicals.
Richard Rowe, CEO of the North America unit, told reporters that chemicals on the site will catch fire and explode if they are not properly cooled, and that Arkema expects that to happen within the next six days as temperatures rise. He said the company has no way to prevent that because the plant is swamped by about six feet of water.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/08/30/arkema-ceo-no-way-to-potentially-stop-an-explosion.html
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You guys might want to be familiar with the facts of the matter before you spout off your anti-business nonsense.
 
Rogue Valley said:
An Obama Executive Order would have required Arkema to relocate their emergency generators significantly higher. Trump rescinded that EO a month ago.
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Cite your reference.

I don't believe that moving generators to lower levels would have been performed just because of a change in regulations. More likely, since they were already installed and on site, they'd have left them, but please, do prove me wrong. Cite your reference that either the company was not compliant with their emergency generator installation under Obama rules or that they moved them to lower ground due to a change in regulations.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
There is no law saying the company can not go beyond what the regulations state. Now and understand I work in the chemical industry we have no idea of what chemicals have leaked into the flood waters. Combined with the Superfund sites that were flooded the Houston area may have a toxic soup that could kill multiples more people in the years to come. From cancers to kidney/liver failure.

A few extra million before the flood vs unknown amounts of liabilitiesin the future. Arkema did not do a good job in disaster management planning. Hurricanes are not unknown in Houston, flooding is not unknown as well. They have dangerous chemicals and as such should have better systems than a general oil tank farm
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Apparently they did. Emergency generators were on site, and were operating, until swamped by 6 foot flood waters.

If the company was operating within regulations and within the law, then what crime would you charge them with? Failure to spend more than they needed to to prevent for a 500 year flood?

How much more would that cost? How much risk is there of a 500 year flood? Those are the legitimate questions in a risk calculation.

The bottom line is that if the company was compliant with applicable laws and compliant with applicable regulations there's no fault on the company's part from a failure caused by a natural disaster.
 
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eohrnberger said:
Site your reference that the company didn't disclose what chemicals they store on site.
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Crosby plant explosion highlights state efforts to block access to chemical information


I don't see a whole lot of residential close by.

View attachment 67222315


You guys might want to be familiar with the facts of the matter before you spout off your anti-business nonsense.
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They had to evacuate over 300 people and warned people downwind to take cover...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/31/exp...orted-at-flood-hit-arkema-plant-in-texas.html



Utah knows all about "downwinders.'
 
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