Posted on 11/15/2014 4:52:02 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Bophal comes to Texas.
methyl mercaptan is nasty stuff
My sympathies to their families.
Yes, it is deadly stuff.
Mr. Clements was right to steer the media away from exploring the cause and give the employees and families their due in such a tragic situation. And it’s all the more hurtful right before Thanksgiving and Christmas as well.
Yikes!
Didn’t Bophal turn out to be intentional?
I hadn’t heard that.
A friend had access to it. He said a single drop under somebody’s front porch would drive them nuts forever. I’m not sure he ever actually did that, though.
I guess that’s Union Carbides position.
No, but it was gross incompetence by the local staff.
I used to work at a chemical plant in that area, adventures and explosions and events seemed fairly common, but not this bad of course.
Do most of these plants around Houston use the byproducts of petroleum?
This couldn’t be. A corporate chemical leak while democrat Obammy is president? This is the stuff of Republican fat cats.
In other (unrelated) news the underground facilities at DuPont Circle in DC might become an underground mall, art studio, hippy kind of place.
http://www.wusa9.com/story/news/local/dupont-circle/2014/11/15/dupont-underground-use/19069939/
The Bhopal gas release was methyl isocyanate.
I suppose but I don’t really remember to what degree, I was there shortly after leaving the Army, around 1974/5 I guess.
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.
I do know it was the local Indian subsidiary was at fault, and that at the time Union Carbide had nothing to do with the plant’s management.
dang!
The floors and sidewalks are poisonous? That doesn’t sound like a good place to work!
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