4 dead in DuPont chemical leak

NBC News ^ | 11/15/2014

[GeronL]

Four people were killed and another was hospitalized in a chemical leak at a DuPont facility near Houston Saturday morning, authorities said.

The hospitalized worker is expected to recover, plant manager Randall Clements said. The accident occurred when the chemical methyl mercaptan, which in low concentrations is used to odorize natural gas, was released in an area of a facility in La Porte at around 4 a.m. Saturday, Jeff Suggs, emergency management coordinator for the city, told NBC station KPRC.

"We will continue to cooperate with all the local authorities and make sure that we investigate this fully and we will find the cause of this. At this point, we don't know why this happened," Clements, the plant manager, said. "I think what I would really rather focus on is the employees, and what we have today is a tragic situation."

The foul-smelling gas spread throughout the area and put the region on edge, but officials said Saturday it had dissipated and was not dangerous. La Porte is about 25 miles from downtown Houston.

[ansel12]

The wife didn’t like me being a salesman, irregular paychecks, and traveling so much, so I was trying to please her with the hard hat and the lunch pail.

I did have incredible life insurance though.

[NonValueAdded]

Juniper bushes give off that gas on low concentration but the human nose can easily detect it. That's why it's used. Anyway, landscaping with a lot of juniper can make you think there's a gas leak.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Didn’t Bophal turn out to be intentional?

An outside investigation by Arthur D. Little found that the disaster was most likely caused by a deliberate act of sabotage, but the saboteur was almost certainly a disgruntled employee who sought to inflict financial harm on UCC, not to harm the local community. The UCC crew on duty began a nearly immediate cover up, rather than trying to mitigate the consequences. Water was introduced into the tank by someone removing a meter and introducing a water hose, a chemical reaction between the chemical in the tank with the water lead to the tragedy.

[GeronL]

I never knew that, interesting

[GeronL]

hard hat, lunch pail... no orange vest? lol

[Squantos]

Did he live next door to Sheila Jackson Lee ?

[boomop1]

I worked at a Vinyl Chloride plant off of Battle Ground Rd 80-85. Miller Cut Off.

[ansel12]

I don’t remember the streets and roads without looking at a map, the Spring Branch part of Houston is my home area, but I do remember the little bars and talking over beers about the highlights of the days when the original Astronauts were regulars and hard partiers.

I also remember that I couldn’t find the bar where I could have wrestled a bear one night, I have never had a second chance at that.

[boomop1]

I lived a mile from Gilly’s in Pasadena then move to LaPorte. Had lots of good times, glad I was driving as I couldn’t walk a few times.

[ansel12]

Gilley’s was huge, and fun.

For those who don’t know it, here is some bio on it.

“GILLEY’S. Gilley’s was a nightclub located in Pasadena, Texas, from 1970 to 1990. The club, owned by Sherwood Cryer, had been previously called Shelly’s. Cryer decided to reopen it in 1970 under the name Gilley’s, with budding musician Mickey Gilley as partner. Gilley, who grew up in Ferriday, Louisiana, with cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart, wanted to call the club the “Den of Sin,” but Sherwood insisted on naming it Gilley’s, since Mickey Gilley himself was to be the headlining act.
Gilley’s launched Mickey Gilley’s career, for the club was an instant success. It filled to capacity nightly soon after the opening. It had a shooting gallery, showers for truckers, a rodeo arena with mechanical bulls, pool tables, punching bags, and a dance floor big enough for thousands. It had a 6,000-person capacity and was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest honky-tonk. Gilley’s was open seven days a week, from 10 A.M. to 2 A.M. Its motto was “We Doze but We Never Close.” Dramatic economic growth occurred along the Texas Gulf Coast in the late 1970s, especially in Houston. Many residents of Pasadena worked in the Houston-area petrochemical plants, and they used Gilley’s as a place to socialize.
Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb, Emmylou Harris, and Roseanne Cash all played at Gilley’s, along with many other famous country artists. Most performances were recorded live and archived, and the nightly shows were broadcast weekly on radio from 1977 to 1989. Live from Gilley’s was carried nationally by more than 500 stations. Thanks to Armed Forces Radio, the show was also broadcast around the globe.
In 1978 Aaron Latham published “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit” in the September 12 issue of Esquire magazine. Cryer had urged Latham to write this article, based on Latham’s experiences at Gilley’s, in hopes that a movie would be made of the story. The movie Urban Cowboy began filming in 1979. Most of the movie was filmed inside Gilley’s. It starred John Travolta and Debra Winger as the characters Bud and Sissy, who meet at Gilley’s, marry, separate, and then reunite.”

[Publius]

I had Lone Star longnecks with a shot of tequila there in 1979.

[ansel12]

Oh man, that sounds good.

Life was easier before all the drinking and driving laws.

[Clay Moore]

Gilley’s was a fun place prior to Urban Cowboy coming out. After that, the whole atmosphere changed because everyone had to come and try and re-enact the movie.

It seemed like there was a fight going on every minute of the evening somewhere. Many were started by one of the guys I used to run with. (^;

[Publius]

I was pretty snockered that night. Fortunately, I wasn’t driving.

[ansel12]

You should have seen the fightings and killings in Houston bars during the 60s, for instance Airline drive bars.

Fighting was a norm, even in the cafes on Friday and Saturday nights, it was annoying if you were dressed up and wanting to keep fresh for picking up your date.

I was so amazed at playing pool in California and seeing them using a chalk board to decide who was next on the pool table instead of a knife or fists, or a gun, but the bar killings seemed to slow in the early 1970s as even the cowboys and good ole boys mellowed.

[Clay Moore]

“You should have seen the fightings and killings in Houston bars during the 60s, for instance Airline drive bars.”

Even Telephone Rd had mellowed by the time I turned 18. You could no longer pick up a rock and throw it from one bar parking lot to the next for the entire 12 mile or whatever it was, length of the road.

[ansel12]

I used to notice that it would take me months to adjust to living in California if I had been living in Texas for a while.

In Texas I would go to the last urinal from the door or into a stall, look for toilets with toilet tank lids, or look for something that could be detached from a wall, but in California I distinctly remember catching myself one night and saying to myself, nothing ever happens here, relax and drop all the hard core situational awareness, (although this predates that phrase).

[HiTech RedNeck]

THAT STINKS!

[GeronL]

Yes it does.

[Nepeta]

My plant was a Hercules plant and we had floors that used nitrogen blankets which could kill you if you spent too long on them, we had 10 story silos blow their tops and rain car sized debris down, while testing an instrument station in the field I knelt on a sidewalk and got contaminated with a caustic (catalyst?) that started eating my flesh which was very creepy and alarming, a fire burned from one of the silos of the plant across the street for months, and in the area other plants were constantly having something bad happening, like fires, or spills, or explosions, it was a very male oriented industrial community.

Sounds like a delightful plant I worked at in Dayton. When I worked the 7 PM to 7 AM shift I was the only woman on the site. Management had to be paying off somebody to keep operating.