Chemicals leak from Houston-area petrochemical fire disrupts ship traffic

FILE PHOTO: Smoke covers the Houston area from a fire burning at the Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park, east of Houston, Texas, U.S., March 18, 2019. Michael Sahrman/Handout via REUTERS

HOUSTON (Reuters) – An earthen barrier holding chemicals that leaked from a massive petrochemical fire outside Houston breached on Friday, prompting restrictions on travel around the site and through a part of the busiest U.S. oil export port.

Intercontinental Terminals Co, a unit of Japan’s Mitsui & Co, called for workers at the Deer Park, Texas, fuels storage facility and neighboring businesses to shelter in place. It was the third time this week that chemical releases from the plant prompted local travel restrictions.

The U.S. Coast Guard halted ship traffic along a five-mile (8-km) stretch of the Houston Ship Channel, creating a bottleneck of vessels looking to enter or leave terminals on a key industrial waterway that connects Houston to the Gulf of Mexico.

Movement was halted between Tucker Bayou and Ship Channel light 116, said Coast Guard Vessel Tracking Service Watch Supervisor Derby Flory.

The breach occurred as emergency workers were pumping pyrolysis gasoline from one of the 11 tanks destroyed or damaged during a fire that started Sunday and took more than three days to extinguish. The tanks can hold up to 80,000 barrels of fuels.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said containment booms were placed in waterways to halt flows into the Ship Channel. The Coast Guard was skimming and pumping contaminated runoff into storage containers, the regulator said.

ITC and emergency officials were working on a plan to stop the flow of chemicals, water and foam into surrounding areas, ITC spokesman Dale Samuelsen said.

Samuelsen could not say how much chemicals and water were leaking from the breach. The barrier held back water, chemicals and foam from an area where firefighters poured up to 20,000 gallons (75,700 liters) of water and foam a minute during the three-day blaze that destroyed tanks able to hold up to 3.3 million gallons of fuels.

Reporting by Gary McWilliams; editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Marguerita Choy

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source: reuters.com