Love the smell of naptha in the morning

I mean, you'd better get used it.  Or at least you should probably always assume it's there one way or the other. Nobody's going to tell you until much later if at all. 

When St. John the Baptist Parish residents woke up on Friday, August 25, they saw a plume of black smoke above the Marathon Petroleum refinery between Reserve and Garyville, Louisiana. Marathon told residents and parish officials that the fire started that morning around two tanks storing naphtha — a type of partially refined petroleum used as an ingredient in gasoline.

But the naphtha leak actually began at 6:50 p.m. Thursday, August 24, 15 hours before residents in the area were evacuated, according to a report to the National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting all oil and chemical spills. The Louisiana State Police were notified about half an hour later. 

Naphtha is a colorless flammable mixture distilled from crude oil to make solvents and gasoline. Exposure to this kind of hydrocarbon mixture can cause headache, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

No worries, of course. The important thing to remember is that no matter how bad it seems, no matter how many trees fall down or buildings collapse or refineries explode on any given Thursday in Louisiana, rest assured, we're still finding ways to make sure somebody makes money off of the disaster.  

For example,

CTEH, an environmental consulting firm companies hire to perform environmental testing during industrial disasters, was also at the fire that Friday morning. CTEH has been accused of downplaying the danger of chemical and oil spills, including the February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the 2010  BP oil spill, the 2005 Murphy oil spill following Hurricane Katrina, and when Texaco (now Chevron) was accused of dumping 18.5 billion gallons of toxic wastewater for years into the Ecuadorian rainforest.

“They called in a company who has made a long practice of never finding any problems,” Rolfes said. “This company has never found a problem and never will. And that is why Marathon called them.”

Louisiana’s air monitoring efforts did not begin until about 1:12 a.m. Friday morning, about six hours after the naphtha leak began, according to Wilma Subra, a Louisiana-based  environmental scientist and toxics expert, who reviewed the LDEQ reports for DeSmog. “They didn’t start the monitoring for a good little while,” she said.

That's the good old resilience economy in action, right there.  Good work if you can get it.

What's exploding now?

It's really hard to keep up.  I still don't think they ever figured out what the January 25th "loud boom" was. Maybe they never will. 

We know where this one came from. 

GARYVILLE — A huge Louisiana refinery was rocked by an explosion and fire Monday. Marathon Petroleum Corp. said six workers suffered minor injuries.

Officials later gave the all-clear sign, but it was not immediately clear what caused the morning blast at the Marathon Petroleum Corp. plant in Garyville, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Six contract workers were injured, Marathon spokesperson Joe Gannon said in an emailed statement. He said three were treated at the plant and three were treated and released at a health care facility where they were taken as a precaution.

 

Might be a good time to do some business with St. John Parish

The school board there just denied Marathon Oil a tax exemption that will result in something like $25 million in revenue for the district. This is good news, of course. The state has been handing over massive public subsidies to petrochemical interests for decades. Thanks to John Bel's decision to revert ITEP authorization to the local level, the public is only now beginning to recoup their losses. Had Eddie Rispone been elected Governor last week... and he very nearly was... we'd be preparing to forfeit all of this progress.

At the same time, knowing what we know about how local government works, we can't help but wonder about the inevitable side effects of this.

But the $25 million is small potatoes compared to larger, expiring exemptions looming on the horizon for St. John Parish.

Although Marathon is the parish's biggest taxpayer, it also enjoys industrial tax breaks on a whopping $3.1 billion in property. Those exemptions are set to expire next year, which would mean a $44 million windfall in parish property tax collections.

That would push St. John's total property tax revenue, now around $55 million, according to the Assessor’s Office, to close to $100 million.

That's a lot of money about to suddenly fall into the laps of some heretofore small time criminals... erm... elected officials.  No telling where it all ends up eventually.  But, still, it's important to remember that even if a school board member's brother-in-law gets a chunk of the money sunk into a new school building, well, that is still a new school building. And it's all a much better way to blow money than on kickbacks to Marathon Oil.