People Before Profit blog

Major explosion at Detroit tarsands refinery

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:50:00 +0000

A major explosion occurred on April 27 at the Marathon Detroit Refinery in Detroit, sending a thick plume of black smoke into the sky above and pollution into the air. It also prompted a brief evacuation order for the neighboring town of Melvindale, though that order has since been withdrawn. Worst of all, this disaster is just one more on top of a laundry list of previous oil-related incidents this month. So far, 2013 is proving to be a devastating year in terms of toxic fumes and spills across the U.S.

It is not yet known what sparked the explosion, but it happened when a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia blew up in a tank during maintenance work. Reportedly, no one was injured or killed. Though this incident was nowhere near as severe as the tragedy that befell West, Texas, the resulting environmental pollution does not bode well for the already economically ravaged city of Detroit. The refinery processes dirty Canadian tarsands oil - the same type that will be flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline if the battle to stop that project fails.

Carcinogens were released into the air as a result of the blast, but it's not yet clear as to how much. Melvindale police department sergeant Michael Welch had told residents that air monitoring equipment indicated that the pollutants were "within acceptable levels," but that might yet change. What should be taken away from this, moreover, is that there really are no 'acceptable levels' with this sort of situation. Indeed, residents reported smelling strong, noxious odors in the area after the incident.

It took the combined efforts of firefighters from three different towns, including Melvindale and Detroit, to put out the fire that broke out after the explosion. Though they put out the flames within two hours, it would have been quicker and easier, said a Detroit firefighter, if that city's fire department had not undergone severe budget cuts and reductions in manpower. And due to cuts in maintenance, there is also a dangerous shortage of equipment. Ironically, on the day of the explosion, emergency manager Kevyn Orr was going to meet with the department's union to discuss the wage and benefit cuts he planned to impose upon them.

The firefighter, whose name was not given, remarked, "We don't have the equipment we need to fight fires as a result of the budget cuts. So the dangers are that much higher. And there haven't been new firefighters hired since 2004, and a lot of guys that are near retirement are going to be pushed out. These cuts mean that incidents like this can cause major problems. If there was another fire in southwest Detroit while this fire at Marathon was happening, it would have swept through the area before other rigs from the city could come to fight it. The city is rolling dice with people's lives."

According to a study by environmental scientists at the University of Michigan, the Marathon refinery was already notoriously toxic prior to this disaster. The study showed that the zip code where the facility resides is the most heavily polluted in Detroit - and Detroit itself is already the most polluted area in all of Michigan. Nearby residents commonly suffer from leukemia, asthma, and multiple types of cancer.

Local resident Malik said, "I was sitting on the porch with my grandson when I heard and felt the explosion. I saw the plume of smoke go up. When the explosion happened, I was really worried. I've lived here since 1955, and I've seen the bad health of this area for a long time. People around here really oppose Marathon." The refinery is "always looming over us, and we have a real fear of living in the shadow of danger, constantly. But they just want to make profits, the people around them be damned."

Photo: Instagram/holamynamesjasmine

Energy giants hold workers hostage as environmental time bomb ticks away

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:36:00 +0000

As the economy falters and the austerity agenda drowns out job creation, oil and coal companies are using their already powerful leverage with brutal disregard for working people and the environment.

Workers in the oil, coal and related industries are literally between a rock and a hard place.

Eke out an existence for your loved ones from currently available jobs and forfeit their future survival. Or, starve.

A case in point is the Keystone XL pipeline project to transport oil from Alberta's tar sands through the Canada-Montana border to Texas Gulf Coast refineries.

The project, which would constitute the world's third largest oil field, would ultimately produce up to three times the carbon emissions of traditional oil.

"We have reached a fork in the road," warns James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Continuing to "go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have - tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic" is creating an irreparable crisis "where our children and grandchildren will have no control over the climate system," the pre-eminent authority on climate change cautions.

So what do transnational corporations profiting from fossil fuel do?

TransCanada, the Canadian firm behind the project, and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's main lobby, cynically dangled inflated job prospects and a Project Labor Agreement guaranteeing the pipeline would be constructed by union labor to entice building trades unions already suffering from mass unemployment in their ranks.

Some argued, with justification given the pipeline's hugely destabilizing effect on the environment and humanity's future, that the unions would do better to forgo this project, instead fight for jobs to renew the nation's infrastructure.

However, those protesting the project would do better to put their organizational strength behind the fight for infrastructure renewal, if they expected a sympathetic ear from construction workers.

What of workers operating already existing pipelines and oil refineries, and coal mines and coal-fired electric plants?

The Blue-Green Alliance Jobs21, including 12 of the nation's largest unions and several long-established environmental groups, has formulated a comprehensive plan to shift to a sustainable economy centered on energy conservation and conversion to clean energy sources.

Undoubtedly taking the lead from the Blue-Green Alliance, in February the AFL-CIO Executive Council called on the president and Congress to introduce this year "comprehensive" jobs creation legislation guaranteeing "environmental sustainability."

But the labor federation also insisted on a "just transition for workers and their communities that would be harmed due to changing energy sources and technologies."

Active support by all of us, including environmental activists, for a "just transition" would go far in winning over workers whose livelihoods depend on oil or coal production.

However, the Republican-led austerity stranglehold in Congress will have to be broken for these proposals, which presuppose a bigger federal government role, to see the light of day.

That means starting today to strengthen the coalitions that will defeat Republicans in the 2014 and 2016 elections.

Essential in this process are energy workers whose self-interests lie in moving to a sustainable economic and political order.

Shows of solidarity with these workers and their unions, now under fierce attack by the energy corporations, are the confidence-building blocks leading to broader overall unity necessary to break the power of the oil and coal barons.

Guided by the union mantra, "An injury to one is an injury to all," the AFL-CIO, many of its affiliates and fraternal independent unions have come in recent years to embrace the various social movements and made their causes the cause of labor.

That includes the fight for a sustainable economic and political order.

At the recent "Good Jobs, Green Jobs" conference leaders and activists of many of the nation's largest unions and environmental groups together explored ways to build on already successful joint initiatives.

They include areas where there is widespread agreement as in weatherizing public buildings and homes, sustainable infrastructure renewal and public mass transit renovation and expansion.

The electoral and legislative process, while the principal form of struggle today, is not the only one that needs to be developed.

The times call for militant action with an eye to winning widespread public support, if not immediately, over time.

Yes, action that disrupts the business-as-usual paradigm.

Actions like the 1930s Flint GM autoworkers plant sit-down strike that led to the organization of the auto industry and the 1960s Civil Rights non-violent civil disobedience that broke the back of South's Jim Crow segregation.

Such militant non-violent acts of civil disobedience contributed mightily to sparking the broad movements leading to the 1930s New Deal reforms that brought us unemployment insurance and social security and the 1960s Great Society reforms that resulted in new civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid.

While we struggle for more immediate partial reforms, the time calls for floating more advanced demands that will resonate with large sections of the American people.

These include turning major sectors of the economy, like energy, into public utilities, democratically run for the benefit of the nation, people, and nature.

Photo: Sasha Y. Kimel/Flickr (CC)

Report: Toxic cloud could sicken millions in Chicago

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:55:00 +0000

CHICAGO - A rapidly spreading toxic cloud of hydrofluoric acid fumes from an accident at two oil refineries in Lemont and Channahon, Ill., could kill thousands and sicken millions in the Windy City, says a leading union authority on worker and public safety.

The threat to Chicago and other areas around the country is so great, said Gary Beevers, who runs the United Steelworkers' sector representing oil refinery workers, that the result would be equivalent to or worse than what happened in Bhopal, India in 1984.

In that disaster, considered the worst industrial disaster in history, as many as 8,000 - 16,000 died and 750,000 or more living in the shantytowns surrounding the plant fell ill under a toxic gas cloud.

The United Steelworkers union released a report on Tuesday as part of a campaign to end the use of hydrofluoric acid in U.S. refineries because, in addition to producing severe chemical burns, the chemical can enter the bloodstream and irreparably damage the heart and skeleton. Hydrofluoric acid can travel in a large cloud for 25 miles or even more from the point of a release. If released into the atmosphere it forms a dense vapor cloud that hovers close to the ground, spreading sickness and death as it billows outward from the source.

Beevers issued his warning and discussed it with reporters yesterday at a press event at the Good Jobs Green Jobs conference in Washington. The conference was called by the Blue-Green alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups.

Beevers says that a U.S. version of Bhopal is possible in more than just the Chicago area. The formation of deadly hydrofluoric acid clouds are also quite possible, he says, over Philadelphia, the Twin Cities in Minnesota, over Canton, Ohio, over New Orleans, and over Texas City, Texas.

Some of the other dangerous plants cited in the report, in addition to the ones in Illinois, include the St. Paul Park Marathon Oil plant near the Twin Cities, three refineries along the Delaware River near Philadelphia, a Marathon refinery in Canton, Ohio, four different refineries in New Orleans and two in Texas City, Texas.

When the populations of all the threatened areas are added up it comes to 26.1 million at risk nationwide.

There appears to be good reasons to compare the impending danger Americans face to what happened in Bhopal.

Hydrofluoric acid is used in refining gasoline in a process called "alkylation," to make the fuel burn more cleanly. It is highly toxic, however, and any accidental release can cause severe burns, damage eyes, damaged skin and respiratory problems.

Wind-blown clouds of hydrofluoric acid quickly spread over wide areas, accounting for the high numbers of people at risk in any accidental release.

So far, we've been "lucky," Beevers admits. But "luck" is relative because the six hydrofluoric acid releases that did happen between 2004-12 hospitalized or severely injured seven workers, four with severe burns.

And a release in 1987 sent 900 people to the hospital in Marathon City, Texas, with 50 square blocks having to be evacuated.

At all seven accidents winds were minimal or non-existent. Higher winds would have caused exponential increases in casualties, experts say.

Beevers is concerned about the refusal of oil companies to even admit that there is a problem. He is frustrated, he says, because oil refineries are on the top of the list when it comes to threatening the health of both their own workers and residents of communities surrounding the refineries.

The refineries he cites are 60 years old or even older,

"Their hydrofluoric acid tanks and pipes are aging and some of them leak. And they are chronically understaffed and short of workers who are trained to find and stop such leaks before they spread," Beevers said.

To compile the report safety experts from inside and outside the USW examined the safety of USW-represented refineries using hydrofluoric acid to refine fuel by reviewing data from OSHA, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board and the industry. Their aim was to see how well these refineries were managing the risk of a hydrofluoric acid release.

At three quarters of the refineries surveyed, a total of 131 hydrofluoric acid-related incidents or near misses had occurred the previous three years. Sixteen sites that reported their most serious events said workers either were or could have been injured, and half said the events caused injuries to people in the community.

More than half of the site survey teams reported that 26 out of 332 safety systems were less than very effective in managing the integrity of the hydrofluoric acid alkylation process.

The study cites alternatives to using hydrofluoric acid and suggests ways existing alkylation units can be made safer. It also says the government could help the process by doing intensive inspections of hydrofluoric acid alkylation units.

"The industry has the technology and expertise and money to eliminate HF alkylation entirely," said Beevers. "It lacks only the will, and if it cannot find the will voluntarily, it must be forced by government action."

Asked why oil companies would resist solving the problem, Beevers says it has to do more with power than greed.

"The refiners don't want anyone," he said in his Texas drawl, "Least of all a little ol' union like us telling them what to do.

The only other thing that would force companies to act, Beevers said, would be a huge and fatal accident like the one in Bhopal.

"But we don't want that," he said. "The point of our report is to publicize the threat before it happens."

Photo: A hydrofluoride acid release in Illinois could send a toxic cloud over the Chicago Loop area. Blake Deppe/PW

Michigan, Louisiana latest victims of oil, chemical spills

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:15:00 +0000

April 1 was no joke in Lansing, Michigan, when equipment at a power plant malfunctioned and caused 300 gallons of oil to leak into the Grand River. Two days later in Chalmette, Louisiana, a pipeline connected to a drum full of chemicals broke, releasing the toxic liquid into the surrounding area, along with airborne cancer-causing agents. These two incidents followed even worse disasters in Mayflower, Arkansas and West Columbia, Texas. This means that the U.S. endured four spills over the course of two weeks. And still, oil companies have not been brought to justice.

The Michigan spill occurred at the Lansing Board of Water and Light's Eckert Power Plant, and for once, the spill came from somewhere other than an oil corporation, small comfort though it may be. Lansing Board of Water and Light is a publicly owned municipal utility that provides water and electricity to Lansing and East Lansing. An equipment failure at their plant caused turbine oil to escape, and soon make its way into the adjacent Grand River.

The utility staff deployed three booms to contain the oil, and the EPA was on the scene almost immediately. Impacts to the local ecosystem are still being assessed, but thick dark patches could be seen by people in parts of the river after the time of the spill.

"An oil spill in the Grand River is alarming, and we're calling for a thorough investigation to determine the extent of the damage and its environmental impact," said Nick Clark, Michigan director for Clean Water Action. "This is another reason why it's so vital to make clean, renewable energy a priority. There is no environmental fallout connected with clean energy sources like wind or solar power."

Brad Wurfel, spokesman for the Michigan Department for Environmental Quality, remarked that though the spill is "manageable in terms of the substance ... and in terms of the environment's ability to absorb it," the smaller size of the incident (in comparison with those in Arkansas and Texas) by no means lessens the negative impact. "It's not a minor spill. We take it very seriously. Nobody wants to see anything spilled in the river. ... We'll probably continue to see [a] sheen [in the river] in the near term."

Luckily, since the oil spilled was hydraulic, rather than tarsands crude, it would cause no foul odor. Nor, said Wurfel, would it release any airborne pollutants. Both of these facts are more than can be said for Louisiana.

In Chalmette, not far from New Orleans, ExxonMobil has added a new disaster to its list of anti-accomplishments. While its Pegasus pipeline continues to poison the Arkansas town of Mayflower, a thick liquid chemical mixture is infecting the air and ground in Louisiana. A pipeline malfunction at ExxonMobil's refinery there caused a (so far) undisclosed amount of the liquid to poison the immediate outside area. Though the leak was quickly reported and stopped, the damage is done.

On the day of that incident, people throughout Chalmette and New Orleans reported a strong, foul odor not unlike oil or gasoline. That was the effect of the chemical, which released 100 pounds of hydrogen sulfide and 10 pounds of benzene into the air. The latter is, according to Before It's News, "a volatile organic carbon compound known to cause cancer."

Petty Officer Jason Screws, of the Coast Guard National Response Center, who was overseeing the accident, added, "The odor threshold for these chemicals is very low. You can smell it a lot sooner when the concentration is enough to be harmful." In other words, it was released in a large enough amount to have a negative health impact.

The bottom line is that oil has tainted land and water in four different states in two consecutive weeks, and right in the midst of right-wing attempts to drum up support for pipeline oil transportation, to boot. Just days before the Arkansas pipeline leak, Alex Pourbaix, president of Keystone XL company TransCanada, had done his best to tout pipelines as the best option for transporting crude. "If you're actually concerned about the environment, you very much want to see oil moving by pipeline," he lied.

On April 11, as part of the ongoing effort to show just how wrong such sentiments are, environmentalists from Texas and various parts of the Gulf Coast rallied outside the G8 foreign ministers' meeting at the Lancaster House in London. Their goal was to send a clear message to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry: that the Keystone XL pipeline must be rejected - particularly after this latest string of oil disasters.

Environmental justice advocate Bryan Parras, who lives in Houston (very near to the West Columbia spill), remarked, "The XL pipeline is set to deliver a toxic slurry of dirty oil to communities all over the U.S. As we've seen from the pipeline spills in [these] last two weeks, the delivery of tarsands is too risky and costly for the communities [that are] in harm's way." The solution, he concluded, is simple: "Keep the oil in the soil."

Photo: An oil-soaked duck recovers in a wildlife management area in Mayflower, Ark. after being exposed to oil there. The Mayflower incident is the worst of the four U.S. spills that have so far occurred over a two-week period. Courtney Spradlin/AP & Log Cabin Democrat

Food News: A birthday, a time to march, a time to sow

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:37:00 +0000

Happy birthday Maya Angelou! Did you know that in addition to her books of poetry, fiction and autobiography she has also written cookbooks? I have 2 in my collection: "Great Food All Day Long" and "Hallelujah! The Welcome Table."

Ms. Angelou, like great cooks everywhere, has been cooking all her life and has always loved to "feed other people." The "Hallelujah!" book is full of wonderful recipes accompanied by delightful stories. "Great Food" is based on her ideas for weight control that can be summed up as "cook splendidly, eat smart." Delightful!

On April 4, fast food workers from across New York City are marking the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by standing up for what's right and going on strike to demand better wages and the right to form a union without intimidation. Click here to sign the petition from Fast Food Forward, and here to visit their Facebook page.

Food workers and the food movement are uniting. On April 3, Real Food. Real Jobs picketed together with Baltimore-Washington International Airport concessions workers, community and faith leaders, and a number of union members from Unite Here Local 23, including American University workers who recently won a new contract! It was a great display of solidarity in Baltimore.

The Farmer Veteran Coalition wants everyone to know about the tremendous support for beginning farmers in the state of Massachusetts through the Matching Enterprise Grants for Agriculture Program (MEGA) that seeks to assist new and beginning farm businesses with start up or expansion costs. And there is a "Troops to Tractors" program providing vets with opportunities for farm jobs and internships near Greensburg PA: one year of working on an agricultural training program like this can help qualify a new farmer for a micro-loan from the USDA.

Who says kids won't eat their veggies? The Center for Science in the Public Interest is a great source of information for anyone who cooks, eats, and wants their children and themselves to be healthy. Recently on their Facebook page they posted some hopeful news: A recent report from USDA found that when children are given healthy fruits and vegetables as snacks in school they're willing to try and eat them!

Did you know that every minute, we lose one acre of farmland to development? Or that since 1982, we've lost over 23 million acres of farmland? That's an area the size of Indiana! In the month of April, Farm Aid is looking at farmland in America, why the skyrocketing cost and the terrible loss of this precious resource.

Photo: Children eat up to half their daily calories at school. CSPI.