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A portion of the Houston Ship Channel remained closed Saturday as the U.S. Coast Guard attempts to determine what amount of volatile chemicals have leaked from fire-damaged Intercontinental Terminals Co. tanks into the waterway that serves as an economic engine for the region.
Test results published by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Saturday afternoon confirmed what officials feared — that contaminants, including carcinogenic benzene, were found in hazardous concentrations in an ITC drainage ditch that flows into the ship channel.
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The Coast Guard has no timetable for when it plans to re-open the closed a 7-mile stretch, home to the second-largest port in the United States, measured by tonnage. What began as a small storage tank chemical fire a week ago now threatens to harm one of Houston’s largest industries.
Jim Kruse, director of the Center for Ports and Waterways at Texas A&M University, said vessels can anticipate bad weather and adjust schedules accordingly. Sudden port closures can quickly bring financial pain to shipping firms. A Texas A&M study of a four-day closure of the entire Ship Channel in 2014, due to a fuel spill, found outgoing vessels suffered $7.3 million in losses.
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“It’s a big mess and a serious problem,” Kruse said. “They have to pay extra when they’re sitting at the docks. If they don’t deliver on time, those penalties add up past, to many thousands of dollars.”
Tim Hicks, a Coast Guard Vessel Control watch supervisor, said Saturday evening 25 vessels are stuck in the ship channel, while another 26 await permission to enter. They include cargo ships, as well as gas and chemical tankers of varying sizes.
“I’ve got ships as large as 820 by 144 feet and as small as 384 by 64 (feet),” Hicks said.
The Guard closed roughly half of the channel shortly after noon Friday, after a containment wall breached at the ITC facility and allowed a sludge of firefighting foam and volatile compounds stored at the site to leak first into a nearby ditch and then into the channel, which flows into Galveston Bay.
Coast Guard Captain Kevin Oditt said crews will continue to use booms, pumps and skimming devices to remove chemicals from the water. The Coast Guard has also brought in its Alabama-based Gulf Strike Team, which assists with major spill clean-ups.
“Once the release happened (Friday), that boom was able to contain much of the spill an contaminants,” Oditt said. “However, some of the product was able to get by the booms, and the Port of Houston fire boats detected an elevated level of benzene.”
Company and government officials said they are unsure how much liquid leaked from the site, though they said the tanks held flammable compounds, such as gasoline blends, xylene, naphtha and pyrolysis gasoline.
TCEQ announced Saturday afternoon that water samples from the ITC ditch were found to have nine toxic substances in concentrations harmful to humans, including xylene, pyrene and toluene. The agency said it has yet to complete analyses of samples taken from Tucker Bayou, the Ship Channel and Galveston Bay.
TCEQ said “worsening and unstable conditions” because of the wall breach forced technicians to adjust their response, but the agency pledged to continue working around the clock.
The leak has also forced the closure of the San Jacinto Monument, Battleship Texas State Historic Site and Lynchburg Ferry crossing, which serves about 1,200 cars daily.
Second fire contained
The containment wall breach allowed flame-retardant foam to leak from the charred Deer Park tank farm and likely caused the site to re-ignite on Friday afternoon, company officials said at a news conference Saturday morning.
The 10-foot breach allowed an unknown volume of foam and volatile compounds from the tanks to leak into a nearby ditch and then the Houston Ship Channel, ITC Incident Commander Brent Weber said. Footage from television helicopters shortly before the eruption showed gaps in the foam blanket covering the site, increasing the risk of ignition.
The fire erupted at 3:45 p.m. Friday at the site of three storage tanks that had already burned and a new location, the ditch into which fuels had leaked. Unlike a brief flare-up on Wednesday, which firefighters extinguished within minutes, Friday’s blazes took an hour to put out.
“Firefighters immediately begin spraying foam on both fires,” spokeswoman Alice Richardson said.
The blazes caused a brief spike in air pollution, tests showed. An air quality reading taken by the Environmental Protection Agency at 5 p.m. Friday on Peninsula Street, across the channel from ITC, found a benzene level five times higher than a level considered safe.
The fires also forced crews back into a defensive position, scuttling plans Friday to continue siphoning fuel from the damaged 80,000-barrel tanks to secure containers, Weber said. The site is too unstable to determine the amount of product left in each tank.
Crews resumed draining tanks Saturday afternoon and several vacuum trucks continued removing liquid from the ditch on the west side of Tidal Road.
“The focus of the unified command today, over the next 24 hours, is to transition back from reactive to proactive,” he said.
The incident commander said he could not rule out further flare ups, and said continuously maintaining the foam layer on the site is key to preventing more fires. Higher winds on Saturday and the potential for rain by Monday may make that objective more challenging, he said.
The company defended waiting 18 hours to brief the public on Friday’s developments, which created an information vacuum that Harris County officials struggled to fill as Deer Park residents clamored for updates. ITC canceled a news conference planned for Friday afternoon.
“I will tell you, as you saw that happening, we saw that happening,” Richardson said. “So it’s fast. It’s moving quickly. We’re trying our best.”
Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton Jr. echoed the frustrations of many residents who wonder, after seven days, when the company will be able to declare the community safe from further fires and chemical discharges.
“In this situation it’s been a never-ending, reoccurring, attempting-to-do-something and it’s just not working out the way it’s been planned,” he said.
Richardson said ITC will brief reporters next at 10 a.m. on Sunday.
The cause of the initial fire this past Sunday remains unknown. The Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office and U.S. Chemical Safety board have begun probes, though the site remains too unsafe for investigators to visit.
Staff writers Jordan Blum and Andrea Leinfelder contributed reporting.