ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge oil refinery had 193 accidental discharges last year, according to a new report by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental health and justice group that created a database of such incidents in the state. More than 1.45 million pounds of material leaked in the local accidents last year, the group’s data shows.
“They’re huge. They’re the second-biggest refinery in the country,” says Anne Rolfes, director of the group. “Even with that size, they have a pretty inordinate number of accidents.”
The Bucket Brigade took data on “unauthorized discharges” reported by 10 refineries to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality from 2005 to 2008 and put together an online searchable resource that debuts today at http://farm.ewg.org/sites/labb/. The group, partly funded with $80,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency, says refineries report each incident to regulators, while the database combines disparate write-ups in a spreadsheet format.
Of the local accidents last year, 151 included no specific information on the cause of the discharges, Rolfes says, something that is required in DEQ reports. Refineries might include a “narrative description” of an incident, she says, but ExxonMobil typically did not give enough detail to let the watchdog group determine whether there had been an equipment failure or some other correctable breach.
“You’re supposed to do a root-cause analysis of the problem so 193 accidents don’t happen (again),” she says.
DEQ spokesman Rodney Mallett says refineries must report emergencies within an hour to the state highway patrol and non-emergencies to his agency in a day. Refineries and other chemical handlers must report on incidents within a week, although reports can be ongoing, pending a determination of cause. “It could be that the information is not there but it is forthcoming,” Mallett says.
Local ExxonMobil spokesman George Pietrogallo stressed that the database contains self-reported information. “We certainly spend thousands of hours every single year monitoring, validating and documenting our compliance to many, many, many regulations, and we routinely report our emissions not only to LDEQ but also the EPA,” he says. “We take every single environmental incident very seriously, and we investigate each one to ensure that we understand the root cause so that we can improve our operation. We have a passion to reduce these incidents to zero.”
According to the data, however, the ExxonMobil Refining & Supply Co. at 4045 Scenic Highway is going in the opposite direction. In 2005, it reported 75 accidents and about a half-million pounds spilled. In 2006 the numbers rose to 78 accidents and about 725,000 pounds, and in 2007 they rose to 107 accidents and about 769,400 pounds before jumping to the figures last year.
The database also looks at refineries in Chalmette, Convent, Garyville, Lake Charles, Meraux, Norco, Shreveport and West Lake. The Bucket Brigade plans a roundtable talk co-hosted by the EPA in February, and invited officials from the 10 refineries to discuss residential safety issues and accident prevention.
Sonyja Thomas, president of the small activist group Communities Empowered for Change, says she lives a handful of blocks from the Baton Rouge refinery and planned to discuss the Bucket Brigade’s project at a news event today at 12:15 p.m. at 3776 Baton Rouge Ave.
“Millions of pounds released in those years of different types of chemicals … are dangerous and harmful to the health of the community,” she says. “The amount that has been released is not acceptable.” She says the incident database is not meant “to cause any problems for Exxon, just trying to make them aware that the people in the community are being affected. Some of them could have been prevented.”
The database says 65 of the 453 local accidents from 2005 to 2008 were preventable.— Todd R. Brown
