When Walter Estrade returned to his home in this refinery town 10 miles southeast of New Orleans, he expected the typical hurricane damage -- toppled trees, tossed cars, a waterlogged house. What he hadn't counted on was the oil.
CHALMETTE, La. — When Walter Estrade returned to his home in this refinery town 10 miles southeast of New Orleans, he expected the typical hurricane damage -- toppled trees, tossed cars, a waterlogged house.
What he hadn't counted on was the oil.
Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters unleashed 1 million gallons of oil from one of the massive storage tanks at Murphy Oil's nearby refinery. The spill spread over 1 square mile and stained 1,700 homes, making it one of the largest environmental spills to occur in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
But it was far from the only one.
A Houston Chronicle review of data from the National Response Center shows that the two storms caused at least 595 spills, incidents that released untold amounts of oil, natural gas and other chemicals into the air, onto land and into the water.
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The quantity and cumulative magnitude of the 595 spills, which were spread across four states and struck offshore and inland, rank these two hurricanes among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Some have even compared the total amount of oil released -- estimated at 9 million gallons -- to the tragedy of Exxon Valdez.
Now, Estrade and many others who live in this fence-line neighborhood are wondering: Even if they do clean up, will the community ever again be environmentally safe? In Chalmette, the spill left dark-brown stains on every car, front door and mailbox. Its drips are motionless on storm gutters. It was even absorbed into Estrade's wife's ceramic pots.
"The oil penetrated everything. It was a compound tragedy," said Estrade, who has lived here since 1975.
The potential exposure to various chemicals as residents return and workers clean up has prompted federal authorities to develop health-based standards specifically for the hurricanes' aftermath, something they haven't done since the World Trade Center collapsed, sending asbestos and other contaminants into the air in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.
"This is about the tenth disaster I have responded to, and this is the worst I have ever seen," said Wally Cooper, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's on-scene coordinator, in charge of overseeing the Murphy Oil spill cleanup. "This is worse than the worst-case scenario."
Representatives of the oil industry say there was no way they could have foreseen or prepared for the environmental mess.
"We don't like to spill oil. Oil that spills is of no value," said Larry Wall, a spokesman for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association.
"You can build your structures to withstand strong winds, rain and storm surges, but nature can always topple you," Wall said.
Even in Houston, which escaped the brunt of Rita, the storm had environmental repercussions. Tons of air pollution was released as refineries and chemical plants shut down and came back on. A boat sank off the Kemah boardwalk.
In Galveston, the storm exposed a past oil spill that occurred on an old tank farm and no one knew about, staining the Pelican Island bridge.
In some cases, the natural disaster actually minimized the environmental one. Oil can't harm towns already destroyed by winds and floodwaters. Sunlight evaporated, and water diluted, many spills.
And because of evacuations, there was nobody to breathe in the toxic fumes.
Yet months later, as people are returning to hurricane-ravaged areas, environmental problems linger, and more still are being discovered.
"We are still getting information about incidents that happened after the storm," said Dwight Bradshaw, a senior environmental scientist with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. "People are coming back and saying, 'Oh, I'm missing a tank.'"
Air-monitoring data released Friday by the EPA revealed that a couple of harmful chemicals are still in the air in Mississippi. Officials don't know the source.
Surveys of a handful of the 54 hazardous-waste sites in the storms' path show that in some cases the hurricanes re-released long-buried pollution.
And samples of sediment taken from residences near the Murphy Oil spill show levels of organic chemicals still high enough to cause people to break out in a skin rash and lead to respiratory problems.
The data compiled by the National Response Center in the week after the hurricanes and analyzed by the Chronicle include spills both large and small. Although some reports are specific, others are vague.
Hundreds of calls came within a single hour across the hurricanes' strike zones, based on the Chronicle's review.
In Louisiana, a new environmental incident was reported nearly every minute days after Rita passed: At 11:21 a.m. on Sept. 26, Chevron reported that crude oil had been released from a platform missing in the Gulf. Six minutes later, the phone rang again.
This time, it was Cytec Industries.
A storage tank at its Jefferson Parish facility was leaking sulfuric acid at 1 gallon every minute.
At 11:33 a.m., 11:37 a.m. and 11:41 a.m., natural gas was reported by people surveying the damage from a helicopter flying over the Gulf, followed by two more oil spills.
"Almost instantaneously, there were hundreds of calls throughout the area," said Cmdr. Ron Cantin, the U.S. Coast Guard's federal on-scene coordinator for southeast Louisiana. In his 26 years with the Guard, Cantin said, he hadn't seen anything like it.
"It was not a single spill from one single source. It was literally hundreds of spills across the region ... that required an unprecedented response," Cantin said.
And in many cases, there was little that could be done about them. In the week after Katrina and Rita, 114 unknown sheens -- rainbow, silver and dark-brown slicks with no clear origin -- were reported, the records show. The spills are so thin and evaporate so easily that they likely disappeared before anyone could reach them.
"Sheen is essentially nonrecoverable," Cantin explained.
Some of the other reports include:
--A tanker truck veering off an Interstate 10 bridge in Baldwin County, Ala., in the midst of Hurricane Rita, and releasing 10,000 gallons of an unknown material from its trailer into Mobile Bay.
--In Mobile, a resident walked into his yard at 4 p.m. on Aug. 29 to find several 55-gallon drums. The oil fumes, the caller said, were overwhelming.
--Chlorine gas escaped from a tanker truck Sept. 1 at Chevron's refinery in Pascagoula, Miss.
--At a storage terminal in Plaquemines Parish, La., on Sept. 3, vegetable oil leaked from a 15,000-gallon tank into an unknown waterway.
--On Sept. 25, a caller in St. Mary Parish, La., reported materials spewing from a tank at an Exxon Mobil facility. The tank, the caller said, had the words "salt tank and benzene" on its side.
The largest oil spill of both hurricanes occurred at Bass Enterprises Production Co.'s Cox Bay facility in Plaquemines Parish, where oil is stored. The two storage tanks on the property were half-full, with 45,000 barrels of Louisiana sweet crude, as Katrina bore down on the coast. That's 15,000 barrels more than the company's hurricane-preparedness plan calls for, and a level that for 50 years has kept tanks from moving.
However, the force of Katrina's 26-foot-high storm surge and the basic tenet of science -- that oil floats on water -- moved the 193-foot-diameter tanks more than 100 feet, spilling 3.8 million barrels of oil. About 450,000 gallons found its way into surrounding marshes.
By the time the oil began to seep out, the company's other contingency plan, a retention pond designed to hold 130 percent of the contents of the two tanks, was already full of water.
"All bets are off with that kind of storm surge," Bass spokeswoman Mindy Brown said.
Yet previous storms and past warnings by hurricane experts indicate that the storage tanks were vulnerable.
In 1961, Hurricane Carla moved a tank in Hackberry, La., more than six miles. And a five-year study released by Louisiana State University's Center for the Study of the Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes in 2003 concluded that storage tanks, many of which rely on the weight of their contents and gravity to hold them down, could be major sources of spills.
"A high proportion of them are not properly tied down," Ivor van Heerden, the center's director, said in a November 2003 report in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "Imagine a storage tank full of diesel lifted by floodwaters, shearing its hoses, and its pipes working loose, and leaking."
Environmentalists say faulty equipment, not the hurricanes, was to blame for many of the spills. For the activist community, the storms' environmental impact has refocused efforts from day-to-day pollution and on to bigger issues such as whether energy infrastructure should be located along a hurricane-prone coast, said Denny Larson, coordinator for the Refinery Reform Campaign.
"People have said for years that they shouldn't have facilities in low-lying coastal areas where contamination risks are great," Larson said. "It's ... the poorest possible choice."
As Congress considers building new refining capacity, environmentalists are already pushing for lawmakers to require companies to have plans for natural disasters. The design of storage tanks also is likely to be a topic in the storms' post-mortem, experts say.
"I'm sure we will get a lot of discussion about requirements for storage tanks," said Harry Rich, executive director of Clean Gulf Associates, an industry-sponsored offshore oil-spill response group. "Any storage tank is required to have a levee system around it to contain oil. That is a design that failed" for many facilities.
But it wasn't just the oil and chemicals stored at massive industrial facilities, in pipelines and on platforms that had the potential to do environmental harm when the hurricanes struck. Cleaning products stored beneath kitchen sinks, gasoline and oil in cars and boats, bacteria from rotting food and refrigerator Freon, which can destroy the Earth's ozone layer, are contaminants, too -- ones that don't show up on the National Response Center database.
"There are barrels of oil out here that have been removed from appliances," EPA spokesman David Bary said.
It also wasn't just manmade chemicals that did damage. Saltwater from the Gulf, dumped onto wetlands by the storm surge, was its own sort of contaminant, killing the plants in the freshwater marshes that formed Louisiana's coast. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 100 square miles of that coastline, the state's first defense for the next hurricane, was dissolved.
For some state scientists, the loss of the coast was the biggest environmental impact of all.
"Valdez didn't reach the coastline. Katrina destroyed the coastline. That habitat is gone," said Bradshaw, of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
The U.S. Coast Guard says all free oil has been collected in Louisiana. In Chalmette, workers hired by Murphy Oil recently sopped up the last of the 25,000 barrels that spilled there; however, no houses have been cleansed of the oil.
That effort could take a year or more, the EPA's Cooper said.
"One of the problems we face is getting the manpower to do it," Cooper said. "This isn't the only game in town, (these spills) are from Alabama to Texas."
Amid the destruction, however, the cleanup went on -- even in small ways.
On the road out of Chalmette, men picked up trash along the highway median.
"Look at that," EPA spokesman Bary said. "It's a start."
RESOURCES:
HOW WE DID IT
The Houston Chronicle examined all spills reported to the National Response Center's online database in the week after Hurricane Katrina (Aug. 29-Sept. 4) and Hurricane Rita (Sept. 23-30).
All spills directly and indirectly caused by either storm on any of those days were downloaded and entered into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
In some cases, it was unclear whether a spill actually occurred, though it was reported. It also is possible that some incidents were reported more than once. However, the newspaper was unable in all cases to determine which were double-reported, so all reports were included.
Using Excel, the Chronicle calculated the quantity of spills by spill type, date reported, media affected, state and county.
ON THE WEB
--To find out the known and potential environmental impacts from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in your neighborhood, log onto the EPA's EnviroMapper: www.epa.gov/enviro/katrina/emkatrina.html#superfund
--To search the National Response Center database, log onto: www.nrc.uscg.mil/foia.html
--EPA post-storm test results from the Murphy Oil spill, air monitoring, etc., can be found at: www.epa.gov/katrina/testresults
To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
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