Two deaths and numerous injuries from chemical leaks in Texas and Louisiana

Refinery in Deer Park, Texas, in March 2012 [Photo by Roy Luck via Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

A hydrogen sulfide leak at an oil refinery in Houston, Texas, on October 10 killed two workers and injured dozens. The day before, an ammonia leak at a plastics plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sent four workers to the emergency room with serious injuries.

Both facilities had been repeatedly cited for safety and environmental violations. There was a major fire at the Texas refinery in 2023 that raged for three days and resulted in nine hospitalizations.

Disaster in Deer Park

The oil refinery in Deer Park, Texas, a suburb of Houston, is owned by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the Mexican state-owned oil company. It was originally operated as a 50:50 joint venture with Shell until it was fully purchased by Pemex in 2021.

The cause of the chemical leak is under investigation and hazardous materials teams were unable to enter the facility for hours due to continued high levels of hazardous toxins.

Hydrogen sulfide, a colorless gas identified by its pungent “rotten egg” odor, is a highly toxic and flammable gas used in petroleum refining. 35 exposed workers were assessed at the scene by first responders and 13 were transported to area hospitals for treatment. When emergency responders were allowed to enter the facility, they found the bodies of two dead contractors, whose identities were not released.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) notes that because hydrogen sulfide gas is more dense than air, it lingers and in high concentrations “can quickly cause death.”

Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez suspected that a flange may have been opened, releasing the deadly gas. Refinery workers commented on social media that this “points to several critical flaws in the LOTO.” [lockout tagout] Procedure for this work area.” In August, an autoworker at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, was killed due to similarly lax enforcement of LOTO procedures.

It took two and a half hours for the city of Deer Park to issue a shelter-in-place order for its 34,000 residents because of the risk of exposure to the toxic pollutants. Industrial disasters are common in the Houston area, the oil refining epicenter of the Western Hemisphere, and cities like Deer Park have emergency warning systems, including sirens and text notifications.

However, Deer Park residents told local news outlets that they received no notification of the incident or a shelter-in-place order.

Chemical burns in Baton Rouge

The previous day, an ammonia leak at a petrochemical plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, caused serious injuries to four workers, all of whom were hospitalized, two of whom were in critical condition. Ammonia is a highly flammable gas with a pungent odor that reacts with moisture in the eyes, skin, and upper respiratory tract, causing painful chemical burns. OSHA states that at high concentrations it is “immediately dangerous to life and health.”

The plant is owned by Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese petrochemical company that has operated the plant since the 1980s. The plant has been cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dozens of times since 2000 for releasing deadly vinyl chloride and other cancer-causing pollutants and has maintained EPA non-compliant status since 2009.

Baton Rouge Fire Department officials reported that a 150 lb (68 kg) storage bottle ruptured, releasing toxic gas. The ammonia quickly dissipated, injuring only the four nearby workers.

In July, an ammonia leak at a commercial food plant in Sterling, Virginia, affected up to 254 employees, 33 of whom were transported to area hospitals by a fleet of first responders, some with serious inhalation injuries. Employer Cuisine Solutions has been cited by OSHA 22 times for safety violations – 14 of them serious – since 2015 and fined more than $160,000.

Alms for the rich and funerals for workers

These industrial disasters are the inevitable result of decades of bipartisan deregulation, the dismantling of basic safety measures by profit-hungry shareholders, and the transformation of union bureaucrats into corporate shareholders tasked with policing their members.

Acceleration, high turnover, lack of training, and lax safety enforcement continue to lead to entirely avoidable disasters that impact workers, their families, communities, and the environment.

Pemex, the largest company in Mexico by net sales and one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies, has the resources to support safe work environments. However, the so-called “left-wing” governments of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and current President Claudia Sheinbaum have focused exclusively on shoring up the state-owned company’s debts and returning it to profitability over the last two years. Pemex posted a net profit of $6.5 billion last year. The Pemex CEO made only a perfunctory statement about the deaths in Deer Park.

U.S. regulators have also created an environment in which sacrificing workers for profit is the only financially sensible strategy. When Pemex’s adjacent chemical plant exploded in 2023, sending clouds of cancer-causing smoke billowing over the Houston area for three days and leading to the hospitalization of nine workers, the state of Texas sued Pemex and its partner Shell for just $1 million.

In 2019, two explosions occurred just hours apart at a facility in nearby Port Neches, injuring two and requiring the evacuation of 50,000 people. The Texas Petrochemical Company, the plant operator, was ultimately fined just $30 million.

In 2005, an explosion at a BP oil refinery in nearby Texas City killed 15 workers and injured another 100 World Socialist Web Site reported on other recent disasters of that time and stated: “Apart from minor fines, none of these incidents have resulted in serious changes to safety standards at petroleum facilities throughout the region.” The only thing that has changed in the past 20 years is that the number of chemical fires in the Texas and Louisiana region has tripled since 2013.

Another key role was played by the trade union bureaucracy, which together helped to monitor deteriorating working conditions. The Deer Park refinery was one of several involved in a limited nationwide strike in 2015, in which safety improvements were a key demand. In the end, United Steelworkers bureaucrats not only pushed through a sell-out deal, but left Texas City refinery workers on the picket line to fend for themselves.

In 2022, the USW pushed through another sold-out national contract, negotiated behind the scenes with the White House, which then-union president Tom Conway openly boasted did not contribute to “inflationary pressures”—that is, keeping wages in line of the new contract were not keeping pace with record inflation.

Formosa Plastics is another example of “crime pays.” After decades of serious environmental violations, the company is embroiled in a permit dispute to build a $9.4 billion mega-facility in the aptly named “Cancer Alley” on the Mississippi River—the largest petrochemical plant in the world—that they are not building in the country could homeland. Formosa Chairman Jason Lin told Bloomberg: “In Taiwan, the government treats petrochemical investments as a polluting industry and stigmatizes us.”

Over the last decade, the state of Louisiana has awarded over $9 billion in subsidies to plastics manufacturers, the vast majority of which, like Formosa, violate air pollution standards. To “incentivize job creation,” Louisiana workers transferred an additional $17 billion in tax breaks to billionaire shareholders, costing over $500,000 per job “created.”

These trends reveal the dead end of capitalist politics. Biden, Harris and Trump all trumpet their pro-capitalist credentials, which amount to ever-increasing inequality, environmental destruction and the sacrifice of workers’ lives and livelihoods for the enrichment of the obscenely rich. The solution is to transfer these vital industries into public ownership with democratic worker control – that is, socialism.

Disaster in Deer Park

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