Read time: 10 mins
By Sharon Kelly •
Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - 12:44
Next Friday, July 12, the
Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery in south Philadelphia is slated to
close its doors, marking the end of an era that began in 1866, one year after
the Civil War ended, when 50,000 barrels of kerosene and chemicals were first
stored on site.
The plant — which continued to
struggle financially after emerging from bankruptcy in August 2018 —
experienced a major industrial accident on June 21. That morning,
a massive fireball lit up the pre-dawn sky over Philadelphia after leaking
hydrocarbon gas had ignited. Five workers were injured, all treated on site.
Three explosions shook walls in Philadelphia and the blast was reportedly felt as far away as South Jersey.
Emerging evidence suggests
that the disaster could have been far more severe — in large part due to a
deadly chemical used at the PES refinery and roughly 50
others nationwide.
Hydrogen fluoride (HF) is one
of the most dangerous chemicals used by industry. When released, it forms rolling clouds that cling low to the ground and can
spread rapidly over long distances.
On the skin, HF burns and causes ulcers. Mixed with water, it forms
hydrofluoric acid. Inhaled into the lungs, it can cause a range of harms, from
cough to lung collapse to the deadly destruction of organs and bones. Breathing the
gas for as little as five minutes can cause death within “a couple of
hours,” according to the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Symptoms can be immediate or delayed for days.
“Aging refineries are playing
Russian roulette with American population centers,” said Tim Whitehouse, a
former enforcement attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), in a statement, noting that more than 22 million people in
the U.S. live near sites using HF. “Counting Philadelphia, three
refineries using HF have had major explosions just since 2015, hardly
cause for continued complacency.”
One Worker May Have 'Saved the
City, Really'
Much remains unknown about the
recent blast, federal investigators said at a press conference on June 27,
explaining that the unit where the explosion began remains too unsafe
to enter.
Hydrocarbon vapors — of an
unnamed type — leaked inside the plant’s “hydrogen fluoride alkylation unit,”
for reasons investigators said remained unknown. Similarly, something — not yet
clear — caused those vapors to spark and ignite, said Kristen Kulinowski,
interim executive for the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard
Investigation Board (known as the Chemical Safety Board).
No HF was released
from the refinery, city officials said. But accounts emerging from workers and
others on site paint a troubling picture of how close to disaster Philadelphia
may have come.
At the refinery on the day of
the blast, alarms had first gone off around 4:00 a.m., the Philadelphia
Inquirer reported, signaling a leak in Unit 433 — the part of the plant that
uses HF as a catalyst to turn certain hydrocarbons
into alkylate, which is blended into gasoline to raise its octane rating (particularly
important for making gasoline from fracked shale oil).
In a worst-case scenario,
according to the refinery’s risk management plan, a major leak of the 71 tons of HF used at PES could have
traveled as far as seven miles in 10 minutes, across an area so densely
populated that it’s home to 1.1 million people.
Back in 2009, 22 pounds of HF escaped and mixed with steam
at the PES refinery, sickening 13 workers (hospitalized as a
“preventative” measure) and leading to four “serious” Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) violations. That same year, the refinery installed equipment to rapidly
drain the unit’s hydrofluoric acid into protected storage in the event of
an emergency.
A decade later, that equipment
may have proved crucial.
“The equipment that was
installed to save the acid worked,” Ryan O’Calaghan, president of the United
Steelworkers Local 10-1, which represents PES refinery workers, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“She’s a f-ing hero. Whatever
she did up there,” an anonymous worker told the Inquirer, referring to the employee who activated
the emergency process. “When you’re ‘on the board’ as we call it, your alarm
screen looks like a slot machine, all the alarms are going off.”
That worker, the Inquirer’s
source added, may have “saved the city, really.”
The Chemical Safety Board’s
four-person team is expected to release preliminary results from its
investigation in six to nine months.
Over 50 people attended a protest
five days after the explosion, with area residents recounting not only their
fear during the June blast and shelter-in-place order, but describing family
members and friends whose deaths from cancer and other long-term illnesses they
ascribed to the plant’s pollution.
“It could have been a lot more
serious,” Mark Clincy, who lives near the site of the explosion and had
received a phone call from the Fire Department instructing him to shelter in
place after the blast, told DeSmog. “They don’t realize, that explosion could
have been a lot worse.”
Philly Refinery
Financial Woes
In the end, it was refinery
management and not government regulators who ordered the PES refinery to close down.
Union workers were stunned to be given just two weeks’ notice; some non-union
workers were let go with even less. A class action lawsuit filed July 1 alleges that
refinery management ignored laws requiring at least 60 days’ notice of large
layoffs; the PESrefinery employed roughly 1,100.
The PES refinery
site sprawls over 1,400 acres in south Philadelphia, comprised of two refining
complexes, the Girard Point refinery, where the accident occurred, and the
Point Breeze refinery, which uses sulfuric acid as a catalyst instead of HF and
which at the time of the Girard Point fireball was undergoing repairs from
a separate smaller fire earlier that month.
The Atlantic Petroleum Company
had established its Philadelphia presence in 1866 — long
before automobiles were invented — using the site to store 50,000 barrels of
kerosene and other chemicals. Crude oil had just been tapped for the first time
in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on the western side of the state. In 1870,
the Philadelphia site’s first petroleum refinery was built — six years before
the invention of the gasoline-fueled engine and nearly
four decades before Ford produced its first Model T.
The 153 year-old plant also
pre-dated America’s cornerstone environmental laws and regulations — and the
site became steeped in toxic pollution.
In more recent decades, the
aging refinery has struggled financially.
“This facility was
significantly less sophisticated than the other East Coast refineries,”
economist Phil Verleger told local public media station WHYY. “It could barely
hang on in a strong market. Once the [crude oil] export ban was gone, it
couldn’t survive.”
In March, the refinery’s
president and COO and its chief commercial officer left PES as
part of what the Philadelphia Inquirer called an “exodus of senior executives.”
In September 2018,
Christina Simeone, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, published a report titled “Beyond Bankruptcy,” which noted both
that the PES refinery was by far the largest source of toxic and
greenhouse gas pollution in Philadelphia and that “[b]ankruptcy did nothing to
change the fundamental structural challenges facing the refinery, nor did it
address new challenges on the horizon.” The report predicted the plant, which
had just emerged from bankruptcy a month earlier, would be bankrupt again
by 2022.
It also hints at the
difficulties that may be involved in building new infrastructure at the site of
the refinery if no buyer emerges to re-open the ailing plant.
For example, the ground below
the refinery had became so saturated in spilled oil, gasoline, and other
hydrocarbons that in 1962 tragedy struck when Philadelphia water
department workers attempted to install sewer pipes at a depth of 40 feet, the
Beyond Bankruptcy report notes. “Attempts to complete the sewer project in the
presence of hydrocarbons eventually led to an explosion, the death of four
construction workers, and subsequent litigation,” it said.
Those hydrocarbons, the report
added, turned out to be gasoline, which was considered a waste product in the
earliest years of the oil industry, when refineries made kerosene and
lubricants rather than automotive fuels. And the plant’s equipment had leaked
for decades. When the first leak collection systems were installed at the
refinery in the 1930s, they collected over 46,000 barrels of oil each month,
the report adds, and “presumably these products were being released into the environment
prior to that time.”
Sunoco, an Energy Transfer
subsidiary which formerly owned the refinery, reached a 2012 agreement with
the EPA to clean up past pollution — but analysts predict legal
battles may be on the horizon.
“We know fossil fuel companies
other places have walked away from what they owe,” Sylvia Bennett, South
Philadelphia resident and member of Philly Thrive, said in a June 26 statement, “and we won’t stand for that here.”
Lawsuit Asks
for Phase-out of Hydrogen Fluoride
On June 25, watchdog group
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a legal petition with the Environmental Protection Agency,
asking the agency to prohibit the use of HF in refining and to
require the phase-out of HFwithin two years.
“[S]uch regulations are
necessary to ensure that the highly toxic substance is no longer used in oil
refineries, given its inherently dangerous nature, the occurrence of ‘near
miss’ accidents, the availability of safer alternatives, and the potential for
terrorist attacks targeting chemical plants,” PEER wrote.
The petition comes on the
heels of an April 23 letter from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB)
to Andrew Wheeler, EPA
administrator, in which the CSB wrote that it “strongly
encourages” EPA to assess the risks of “catastrophic releases”
of HF and to consider requiring a phase-out of HF nationwide.
Philadelphia is not the only
place where HF has recently posed risks during
industrial accidents.
On April 26, 2018, the Husky
Energy refinery in Superior, Wisconsin, which has a population 27,000, burst
into flames, prompting an evacuation, though no HF was reported as released.
In February 2015, a Torrance,
California, refinery that used HF experienced an explosion — and a
40-ton piece of equipment was sent flying. It landed within 5 feet of two storage tanks holding a
“modified” form of HF, which is designed to lower the risk of the gas spreading as
far, but which critics argue still poses significant risks.
In 2012, five workers were
killed and 3,000 people sought
medical treatment after an explosion and leak of hydrofluoric acid at
the Hube Global plant in Gumi, South Korea.
In February, a presentation by
California air quality regulators identified 10 small leaks of modified HF from
two area refineries since 2017. On June 22, the day after the Philadelphia
blast, California authorities voted 3-2 in favor of a measure that would allow two
of the state’s refineries to keep using modified HF with extra
safety measures.
Eight major metropolitan areas
— Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Texas City, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City,
Canton, and Memphis — were home to or near 19 refineries that use HF or
modified HF, a 2013 report by the U.S. Steelworkers
found. They tallied 22 million Americans living near those plants.
“EPA should finally act
to relieve millions of Americans from living with a chemical sword of Damocles
hanging over their heads,” said Whitehouse, who is currently executive director
of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “These refinery accidents
cost consumers billions of dollars at the gas pumps, just a small fraction of
what it would cost industry to upgrade to safer alternatives.”
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