Deadly refinery leak adds to US toxic accident toll
By Dana Drugmand
A Texas oil refinery with a history of environmental violations was the site of a deadly hydrogen sulfide leak last week, killing two people and injuring more than two dozen others and adding to a long list of US industrial accidents US regulators say they are trying to rein in.
The chemical release is also the latest accident at the Houston refinery. The facility has been cited for nearly 2,000 environmental violations over the past decade.
Located in Deer Park, Texas along the Houston Ship channel, the 1500-acre refinery complex is owned by the Mexican oil company PEMEX, which took over full ownership of the facility from Shell in 2021.
The incident at the refinery, which occurred on the afternoon of October 10, killed two PEMEX employees, and at least 35 others were treated on the scene or transported for further medical attention, according to officials.
Hydrogen sulfide is a colorless, extremely flammable, highly toxic gas that gives off a rotten egg odor. Exposure at lower concentrations can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, irritation of the eyes, throat and respiratory tract and loss of smell, and acute exposure at high concentrations can result in unconsciousness and even death.
“Unfortunately, Texas has a poor track record of forcing petrochemical facilities to take safety and compliance seriously,” Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said in a statement. “It makes me wonder if this awful incident could have been prevented.”
In Hurricane Milton’s wake, toxic “gypstacks” threaten Tampa Bay area
By Shannon Kelleher
As southwest Florida reels from the impact of Hurricane Milton this week, the first hurricane to directly hit the Tampa Bay area in a century, environmentalists are bracing for another possible impact – the contamination of local waterways from towering stacks of toxic industrial waste in the storm’s path.
When phosphate is processed into fertilizers for farmland, enormous quantities of phosphogypsum are left behind as heaps of concrete-like waste called “gypstacks,” which are topped with liquid waste ponds. Most US phosphate production takes place in Florida, with 25 of the 30 gypstacks located in the Sunshine State – a quantity totaling over a billion tons. The waste contains heavy metals as well as radium, which decays into a radioactive gas that causes lung cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“We refer to [the stacks] as ‘Florida’s Mountains’,” said Ragan Whitlock, staff attorney for the environmental nonprofit the Center for Biological Diversity, noting that the heaps of toxic chemical waste are each hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet tall. “Lesser storms than hurricanes have created massive structural integrity problems at these stack systems,” he said.
Of Florida’s 25 gypstacks, 22 were “at least generally in Hurricane Milton’s track,” said Whitlock, with three located directly near the bay. Whitlock said he is worried about pollution from the stacks impacting both the bay and the Floridan aquifer, which almost 10 million people depend on for drinking water.
The largest US producer of phosphate fertilizer, The Mosaic Company, confirmed in an email Friday that stormwater at its Riverview site, where it stores toxic phosphogypsum waste from fertilizer production, made its way into Tampa Bay after a water collection system onsite became overwhelmed following the hurricane.
“At this time, we believe some of that impacted stormwater made its way to an outfall which discharges into Tampa Bay,” said the Mosaic spokesperson. “The issue was addressed yesterday and is not continuing. The volume may have been greater than the 17,500 gallon reporting standard. We expect water quality impacts, if any, to be modest.”
Mosaic said in a September 30 statement that early assessments showed “limited damage” to its facilities following Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm that hit Florida on September 27, although its Riverview facility “experienced water intrusion caused by the storm surge.” In an early June statement, Mosaic said it was “prepped and ready” for hurricane season.
Nearly 100,000 birds dead in botulism outbreak linked to climate change, water diversions
By Douglas Main
An ongoing outbreak of botulism, a bacterial illness that causes muscle paralysis, has killed more than 94,000 birds at Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, the worst such outbreak at the lake ever recorded, according to federal scientists.
Affected birds often cannot control their muscles and often suffocate in the water, said biologist and ornithologist Teresa Wicks, with Bird Alliance of Oregon, who works in the area. “It’s a very traumatic thing to see,” Wicks said.
Though local in scale, the outbreak and catastrophic die-off are tied to global problems including declining wetlands, increasing demand for limited water resources, hydrological diversions, and a warming climate.
These kinds of outbreaks can happen around the world and the phenomenon seems to be on the rise, according to Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who studies bird migration.
“Given warming temperatures, droughts, then intense periods of rain followed by drying… the hallmarks of climate change are all over this,” Farnsworth said.
The pestilence is caused by a toxin produced by a specific type of bacteria (Clostridium botulinum) that thrives in the area’s warm, stagnant, low water levels. Botulism can also affect people, though no human cases have been reported in this instance. Other outbreaks have been reported around the world, but generally cause far fewer deaths. A botulism outbreak in 2020 caused by similar conditions killed an estimated 60,000 birds at Tule Lake.
The Klamath Basin, of which the refuge is a part, has been disrupted by man-made dams and irrigation canals for over a century. The developments and diversions eliminated more than 90% of the area’s wetlands.
Tule Lake is an ancient water body, whose levels swelled and ebbed, but always remained, for hundreds of thousands of years. Historically, the lake and nearby wetlands would fill with water during the winter rains. Now, the water supply comes almost entirely from irrigation canals.
“Like steroids for hurricanes” – Scientists say Helene just a warning of what is to come
By Dana Drugmand
As the full extent of the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene in the southeastern United States becomes clear nearly two weeks after the monstrous storm made landfall, a new scientific analysis confirms what many have already surmised – climate change worsened the hurricane’s catastrophic impacts.
As Helene demonstrates, more destructive storms are likely in store as society continues to burn oil, gas and coal, driving a rapidly warming Earth, the analysis warns.
“Yet again, our study has shown that hurricanes will keep getting worse if humans keep burning fossil fuels and subsequently warming the planet,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative, which released the study on Wednesday.
In the aftermath of extreme weather events, World Weather Attribution scientists use observational data and climate models to conduct what are called rapid attribution analyses. Their analysis of Hurricane Helene revealed that climate change increased the intensity of the storm’s damaging rainfall and winds. It also found that elevated sea surface temperatures, which fueled Helene’s development, were made up to 500 times more likely by anthropogenic warming.
“It is clear that the rainfall, wind speeds and conditions leading to Hurricane Helene have all increased due to climate change,” the study states, noting that such conditions will intensify as the planet heats up.
Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane along the Florida panhandle late on September 26, generating heavy rains, winds, and record-breaking storm surge along the coast. The storm then tracked inland, bringing torrential rains and flooding to Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. With more than 230 reported fatalities, Helene is the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland US since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“Unfortunately, Helene is another warning that the effects of climate change are already here,” said Julie Arrighi, Director of Programmes at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
This warning and the new analysis come as Florida braces for a hit from another major hurricane. Hurricane Milton, projected to slam into Florida’s Gulf Coast late on Wednesday, briefly upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane on Monday as it moved across overheated waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Milton is brewing are at record-breaking highs, and scientists say that climate change made those temperatures up to 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks.
Climate scientists agree that planetary warming, which is primarily driven by fossil fuel combustion, results in more destructive hurricanes. Oceans absorb the vast majority of the heat added to the Earth’s climate, and hotter marine temperatures provide more energy to fuel tropical storm systems. With the atmosphere also warming, it can retain more moisture that subsequently releases in the form of heavier rainfall.
“The heat that human activities are adding to the atmosphere and oceans is like steroids for hurricanes,” Climate Central chief meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky explained.