For more than 100 days in 2019, a dangerous chemical material was expanding inside a 16-inch-diameter pipe at a Port Neches chemical plant — rapidly forming into a sort of toxic popcorn, pushing against the metal walls.
The night before Thanksgiving, that pipe suddenly ruptured, allowing 6,000 gallons of liquid butadiene — a highly flammable petroleum-based chemical used in plastic production — to come gushing out in less than a minute. The butadiene instantly vaporized into a cloud, ignited and caused an explosion just two minutes later. The blast was felt up to 30 miles away.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency that investigates chemical incidents, found in its final investigation of the 2019 explosion at the TPC Group LLC plant that the company failed to identify problem areas where dangerous “popcorn polymer” might build up and never implemented a safety recommendation to regularly flush pipes connected to out-of-service equipment.
