Hydrogen Fluoride

Will County environmentalists are calling on county officials to probe into a recent chemical spill at the Exxon refinery in Joliet and to force companies to cut public health hazards.

 Citizens Against Ruining the Environment (CARE) wants a public meeting in the wake of an Aug. 11 fire at the refinery, when propane and hydrogen fluoride, or hydroflouric acid, spilled into the surrounding environment.  Hydrofluoric acid can cause severe burns and extreme heart, lung and bone damage.

The Joliet area near the refinery has one of the largest at-risk populations of any urban facility in the US, according to company and federal Risk Management Plan data. The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigations Board is looking into the August fire because any incident involving a potentially disastrous hydrogen fluoride release in an urban area is "a serious wake-up call," CARE says. 

"There shouldn't be any hesitation, including money, for industry to do the right thing & convert from extremely dangerous chemicals such as hydrogen fluoride to safer chemicals," said Ellen Meeks Rendulich, CARE Director.

Investigators also examining a hydrofluoric acid discharge during a July 19 fire at Citgo Petroleum Corp's Corpus Christi, Texas, refinery, are looking into the Joliet refinery fire, board spokesman Daniel Horowitz told Reuters.

"There's a general concern that there have been a number of these alkylation unit accidents," he said. "Any time hydrofluoric acid is released, it's a cause for concern."

Congress is now debating a Chemical Security bill that would require companies to study, and adopt safer chemicals and processes, especially in urban areas. There have been other recent chemical releases involving disaster-potential chemical processes, including Hydrogen fluoride in other cities

CARE, based in Lockport, is asking the Will County Board to direct an investigation of the Exxon incident and hold a "lessons-learned" meeting to inform the public. It's calling for a review of all the disaster potential facilities and transportation flows in the county, and recommendations on ways to reduce risks.

CARE wants the county to require facilities to report to the County annually on risk reduction efforts, and to adopt safer technologies. It's asking the county to include chemical risk information on its web site.

Corpus Christi citizens are daily at risk of Bhopal-scale toxic gas HF disasters, and do not even know it. 

The lack over several days of Caller Times coverage of the July 19 Citgo refinery fire, which involved substantial releases of deadly Hydrogen Fluoride (HF) gas (at first denied by the company) and which astonishingly (in view of the disaster potential) brought no order for precautionary evacuation of thousands of citizens, only underlies this bottom line truth.  The better-informed US Chemical Safety Board, other federal agencies and Congress are interested, however, in what lessons can be learned here.

The fault lies not mainly with Corpus citizens -- except for not insisting on an effective and protective government, at any level.  The refinery industry officials they rely on for life-and-death decisions have for decades deliberately kept them unnecessarily at high risk, and in the dark about the risks and about the far safer alternatives to HF processes. 

As far as local and state government, the Caller Times editors can no doubt usefully inform their readers how many times in the last 20 years the Local Emergency Planning Committee, mandated in 1986 by Congress to inform the public about chemical disaster risks, or the Texas Department of Environmental Quality, has come to the newsroom and asked the newspaper to vividly show its readers maps of its community hazard assessment, showing the 5-mile-radius toxic gas HF vulnerable zones around the five Corpus HF-using refineries.  I would guess zero times, right?  Other chemical community newspapers have taken the initiative to do and/or publish this mapping on their own --  in Baton Rouge, Houston, Buffalo, Contra Costa County, etc.

In 1986, shortly after the Bhopal India disaster, Amoco's $2 million field test release of  an HF toxic cloud at the federal Nevada Test Site decisively showed the 5-mile danger zone.  But the stunned industry did not inform the 50 HF-using refinery communities, oil worker unions, or fire chiefs, much less elected officials or the media. 

So when the Texas City Marathon refinery HF release hit a year later in 1987 (a serious but from sheer luck not a worst case toxic gas cloud), of course the emergency response was terribly bungled.  In its recent investigations of US chemical releases, as former Chairman Carolyn Merritt testified in Congress, all the communities' emergency preparedness was on a par with Bhopal India.

Texas cities are many years behind in dealing seriously with the unnecessary disaster risks of HF refineries, other chemical facilities and chemical transportation.  Full disclosure:  I personally briefed new Mayor Mary Rhodes just before she took office about Corpus refineries' HF dangers; she prioritized her political capital instead on getting a secure water supply for the city.

Worried Los Angeles regulators began in 1988, after another 1987 HF release in Torrance CA.  The HF Task Force assessed the potential disaster consequences of the six HF refineries (and HF railcars) in the city as unacceptable, and in 1991 passed Rule 1410 which forced them to switch to a non-disaster alternative process over a seven-year phase-out period.  As recently as last year, Bakersfield citizens, firefighters, nurses, oil workers, and regulators mobilized to force Big West Refinery to abandon plans to bring a new HF alkylation unit to the city, and instead to build a non-disaster-risk process.

It is extremely unlikely that any new major HF facility will ever be built in an American city.  It is way past time for a sweeping evaluation, beginning with public meetings on the seemingly reckless handling of the recent Citgo HF releases, of the serious risks in Corpus of accidental HF releases and of the available alternatives. 

And if the Corpus city fathers (and mothers) have ever taken any civic pride at being a key world-scale energy-production center on the vital oil-producing Gulf Coast, they might also consider how attractive the string of Refinery Row HF-using refineries could be as a terrorism target.  Federal officials no doubt worry about how one or more carefully planned and executed deliberate HF toxic gas releases over the city, threatening thousands, might send a powerful shock worldwide to other cities in the vulnerable energy sector supply chains.  Forcing the use of non-disaster alternatives to HF, as the Washington DC sewage plant did hurriedly after the 9/11 attacks in switching away from chlorine gas railcars to bleach, would eliminate a significant terrorism risk in Corpus.