Harris County Pollution Control researchers didn’t find evidence of the compound that a company said caused smells last week that prompted widespread health complaints, highlighting how difficult it is for first responders to find out exactly what is escaping into the air independently from the company where an incident is occurring.
After a chemical mixture released through a rail car’s safety vent, Lubrizol Corp. attributed the smell to mercaptans. But the county couldn’t immediately test for them in mobile air monitoring and took an air sample to run more specifics, which didn’t detect mercaptans either. Air monitoring devices pick up compounds at varying levels of specificity and only if enough is present.
Lubrizol spokesperson Sarah Arroyo explained in an email that though the company did not detect mercaptans either, the chemical mixture in the tank was expected to break apart into that, among other compounds. Mercaptans, broadly, are gases that contain sulfur that are used to make natural gas pungent. Arroyo said people can smell the compounds even in amounts so small that monitors cannot pick it up.
Arroyo said there were no expected long-term health risks associated with mercaptans in that amount.
The situation that evening on Aug. 16 was complex because while Lubrizol knew what was in the tank — a unique zinc phosphate blend — the tank had been partially heated, and chemicals can change when they react with other compounds in the air. In this case, Lubrizol officials expected mercaptans, hydrogen sulfide and other compounds could escape through the vent. They initially alerted emergency officials to hydrogen sulfide, which is extremely dangerous.
And the company did detect hydrogen sulfide at the accident site near Deer Park. It reported releasing 100 pounds of hydrogen sulfide in an initial report to the state. But it maintains that mercaptans were the “primary source” of the smell. Arroyo said hydrogen sulfide was not detected off of the property. Harris County Pollution Control mobile equipment didn’t detect it offitie either, meaning it wasn’t there or the levels were too low for the equipment.
Lab Manager Mohammed Serageldin said his lab equipment couldn’t test for it, and he noted that it also may not have been there because it is highly reactive.
“Most of the time you are looking for the primary pollutant, or the thing that you think was emitted from the source,” Serageldin said, “but the problem is, depending of course on its reactivity, it doesn’t remain in the environment or in the air for a long period of time, and it’s converted, and that’s another problem… No one knows what exactly was released. Was it really mercaptans? I don’t have evidence of that.”
Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia said in a statement that the county had improved significantly in its ability to respond to industrial incidents, no longer blindly accepting what industry said. On Tuesday, county commissioners were expected to consider whether to take legal action against Lubrizol. But he argued state regulations overall weren’t stringent enough to defend the community and that the county needed industry to be transparent during events.
The predicament left people such as 39-year-old Andrew Peterman wondering what to do. He lives in League City, in Galveston County, and has a background in healthcare data. A rotten egg smell woke him Sunday night, and when he went outside to investigate if something was leaking around his house the air felt soupy, stung his eyes and made it hard to breathe.
Peterman looked online and made phone calls to various agencies to try to figure out what was happening but couldn’t find a unified source of information about what exactly caused it. He felt there was no reliable group to tell him how dangerous the situation might be. So Peterman’s wife and three kids went to stay with a relative in Friendswood, while he turned off the AC in their home and camped out with their puppy.
He had a rule of thumb to guide him: “If you can smell it, there’s a problem.”
emily.foxhall@chron.com
emily.foxhall@chron.com | Twitter: @emfoxhall
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