US chems in talks with DHS on Gustav

28 August 2008 20:56  [Source: ICIS news]

WASHINGTON (ICIS news)--US chemical industry officials were in active communication with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and with pertinent state and local emergency response officials in preparation for Tropical Storm Gustav.

As of 13:00 Houston time (18:00 GMT), the tropical storm was about 40 miles (65km) east of Kingston, Jamaica, according to the National Hurricane Center. Gustav was expected to become a hurricane on Thursday and was projected to pass through the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall at Louisiana.

Bill Allmond, director of government relations at the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA), said that “DHS has spent enormous resources to help secure the chemical sector during a hurricane”. 

He said that the department has conducted substantive preparedness drills along the Gulf coast, established infrastructure-specific coordination centres, “and is continually working with the Gulf states and industry there”.

“The big difference today is the close working relationships between DHS and industry formed after Katrina to specifically address hurricane preparedness,” Allmond said.

“Through outreach efforts on both ends, they know who we are and we know who they are, and expectations about the role that both industry and government must play during another hurricane crisis have been better understood,” Allmond said.

Ed Flynn, director of security and safety with the Louisiana Chemical Association (LCA), agreed that “there is much, much closer coordination between our member companies’ facilities and local emergency response teams”.

Another significant difference from the 2005 hurricane disasters is a recent Louisiana state law that gives certain industrial facilities such as chemical plants priority access to critical supplies in the aftermath of a major storm, Flynn said.

He said one of the lessons learned from Katrina and Rita in 2005 was that the storm-related shutdown of natural gas pipelines and power interruptions delayed restarts for many chemical plants along the US Gulf coast.

Under a Louisiana law passed in 2006, chemical plants are now on the priority list for resuming supplies of natural gas, Flynn said.

“We’re not as high on the priority list as hospitals and nursing homes, of course,” Flynn said, “but at least now we are on the list and we’ll be able to get natgas supply restored faster than in 2005.”

Flynn said that chemical plants in Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf coast have equipped their “ride-out” crews with cell phones that have numbers based in area codes outside of the storm-threatened coastal regions.

In the 2005 storms, those plant personnel that were to stay at the facility to ride-out the storm and react to critical developments discovered that all of their cell phones went dead when hurricane winds knocked out local cellular service.

“Now we’ve got ride-out crews that carry cell phones with Wisconsin, Colorado and New Hampshire phone numbers,” Flynn said.

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By: Joe Kamalick
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