Source: Houston Chronicle, April 2, 2019
Posted on: http://www.advisen.com
Fifteen days after a fire at a Deer Park chemical facility, another fire at a chemical incident is belching black smoke into the air again.
The KMCO facility in Crosby caught fire Tuesday. The facility lies a little more than two and half miles from the Arkema plant that notoriously caught on fire after losing control of its stores of organic peroxides during Hurricane Harvey.
The Crosby chemical facility, like the Intercontinental Terminals Co. facility in Deer Park, has a history of environmental and workplace safety issues.
The facility is currently not compliant with the federal Clean Water Act. KMCO was in violation of the Clean Water Act for seven of the last 12 quarters. It violated the Clean Air Act three times in the last 12 quarters. Environmental Protection Agency data shows the facility also violated the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act on Feb. 22, 2018. The RCRA regulates how facilities handle hazardous and non-hazardous solid waste.
The plant has dozens of OSHA violations since 2010.
A runaway reaction sent three employees at the KMCO plant in Crosby to the hospital on Christmas Eve 2010. Workers there couldn’t lower the pressure in a reactor and as they tried to fix a clogged line, they accidentally mixed a caustic solution with maleic anhydride, a normally stable chemical. The result was an explosion and fire.
Harris County sued the KMCO plant in 2008 for spills and fumes that gave neighbors headaches. The lawsuit ended in 2009, with a permanent injunction requiring KMCO to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and to give investigators easy access to the facility and prompt notification of releases. It has been about a year since the facility’s last inspection, according to EPA records.
A Houston Chronicle report from 2016 found that there’s a major chemical incident once every six weeks in the greater Houston area.
The 2016 Chronicle report, researched in coordination with Texas A&M University, evaluated facilities based on the potential dangers posed by chemicals on site and the number of people who lived nearby. That report found that the KMCO facility posed a high potential for harm, a 11.24 out of a 14-point scale.
KMCO’s safety manager at the time, Kelly Nidini, said the company had significantly upgraded its facilities since 2013, won multiple industry awards and was planning on investing millions, primarily for safety and environmental concerns.
“We have no higher priority than ensuring safe and compliant operations,” Nidini told the Chronicle in 2016.
KMCO’s Risk Management Plan states that its worst-case scenario involves a chemical called ethylene oxide. There’s a storage tank of 246,000 pounds of the chemical on the site. Ethylene oxide is flammable, toxic and reactive. It’s a known human carcinogen.