When the lights went off during the winter storm last month in Galena Park, a city of 10,000 people on the east side of Houston, an eerie orange glow emanated from across the bayou that borders its southern edge as the refineries that line the Ship Channel lit up the night sky. Chemical plants and refineries which hadn’t shut down in preparation for the brutal cold of the February 15 winter storm, and the massive power outages it triggered, burned off thousands of pounds of dangerous and unprocessed chemicals as they rushed to shut down during the emergency.
Over the course of the week-long winter storm in mid-February, industrial plants statewide emitted more than 3 million excess pounds of pollution, according to an independent analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, Air Alliance Houston, and Environment Texas. After Hurricane Harvey, for comparison, plants along the Gulf Coast emitted 1 million pounds of excess pollution. The process is like an out-of-control pressure cooker: chemicals and gasses had to be let out of the facility before the power went out, or the whole plant could explode.This led to massive amounts of air pollution that far exceed the volume that the plants have permits for.
Juan Flores, a resident of Galena Park who works for Air Alliance Houston, an environmental advocacy group, knows that this time, his neighborhood was lucky. “You could see the flaring, you could hear it, like a buzzing sound coming from the channel,” he says. “But the winds were blowing into the south.” Galena Park residents, trapped in their homes because of the icy roads and power outages, couldn’t smell the toxic chemical soup that was wafting out of the Ship Channel. Instead, the fumes were blown into Pasadena.
