Report Detail:

Vapours from the 100 tons of natural gas liquids that escaped Tuesday night from an underground salt cavern at Huntsman Polymers Inc. posed no health threat to humans, officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said.The regional Director of the Commission said a preliminary analysis of data recorded during the incident by two air monitors indicate the emissions are “not expected to have reached concentrations of concern to human health.” “The stuff they reported was released and what we detected did not pose a long-term health risk to Odessans,” he said Thursday.

The compounds released in the accident were ethylene, ethane, propane, butane and butene.

The commission maintains air-monitoring devices, or gas chromatographs, at Hays Elementary, 1100 S. Monahans Ave., on the south side, and Gonzales Elementary, 2700 Disney St., on the east. The Director of the Commission said exposure to the compounds can cause eye irritation, coughing and sneezing and overall respiratory discomfort. “But as far as them worrying about a long-term health effect, like cancer, these chemicals have not been shown to cause long-term health problems," he said. He also said the foul odor that accompanied the release was probably caused by butene, a chemical cousin of butane. But he said the agency is “still trying to track down what those odors were.”

Meanwhile Huntsman General Manager said the accident has not affected operations at the plant. The effect of the incident, which was caused by a faulty metal gasket in a pipeline flange, has been felt primarily by employees, who have gotten little sleep since the leak was discovered shortly before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, the manager said. “There’s quite a few tired people,” he said on Thursday. “Many of us were up 48 hours working on this thing.” No one at the complex was injured in the incident, and Medical Center Hospital said no one came to the emergency room Tuesday night or Wednesday with symptoms from exposure to the gases.

In its preliminary report to the commission, Huntsman reported the release of 235,000 pounds of volatile organic compounds over a four-hour period. Most of the material was ethylene but other compounds included ethane, propane, butane and butene. Using the feedstocks ethane and propane, byproducts of natural gas, Hunstman manufactures polyethylene and polypropylene — thermoplastic resins that are used for containers and packaging, molded products and fibers. On Thursday, The General Manager said crews continued to reduce pressure inside the underground cavern from which the gas escaped. “It takes a long time to get it down to a point where it’s safe to operate,” he said, adding that it would take another day or two before the actual repair of the pipeline wellhead can begin.

The General Managere also said operations were not significantly impacted because Huntsman has access to nine other underground storage caverns at its nearly 1,000-acre site. Other than the physical stress the incident placed on employees, the plant is functioning normally, he said. “It’s obviously a resource strain on the site,” and “a lot of our technical people are going to be working on this, and they would typically be preparing for the turnaround.”

Next month, Huntsman will temporarily idle the plant for maintenance purposes. The General Manager said the company wouldn’t be able to determine the value of the lost gas until the cavern is emptied.“Once we get in a position where we can put a temporary fix to the well, we can pressure it up and push out whatever remaining volume is in there and then remove the wellhead and do a math balance to decide how much we lost and how much we recovered,” he said. Tuesday’s accident has had no economic impact on the plant, he added. “Not at all. This site is one of the more profitable that Huntsman has, certainly in North America, the business is very strong.” Huntsman has 14 days to file a detailed report of the incident to the TCEQ.

Odessa American - March 19th 2004.