Setting Legal Regulatory Limits 

"We're not perfect."
"We're doing our very best and will continue to work to get better."
"We will likely see additional incidents."
Arkema CEO Richard Rennard

"By all means, the plume is incredibly dangerous."
Brock Long, administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency

"[The agency had received] no other reports of concerns [from other chemical plants in Texas]."
"The facility is surrounded by water right now, so we don't anticipate the fire going anywhere."
Andrea Morrow, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality

ABC-13 Eyewitness News

The floods hitting Houston, Texas, from the monumental storm Hurricane Harvey has brought Texans together in a spirit of overcoming a natural catastrophe that has taken 38 lives, destroyed countless homes and buildings and forced the evacuation of many residents of the area. Rescue teams fully expect to discover more casualties from the storm as they reach homes and stranded vehicles, finding the dead within. Survivors have heart-breaking stories to tell of their near brushes with death.

And the state and its people -- reports of looting aside -- will recover, given the resiliency of the American spirit and the wealth of the country enabling it to use the expertise of its various emergency agencies to assure the stricken and the homeless that there is help for them. Ferocious storms are not unknown in the area. Despite which 80 percent of homeowners had no flood insurance, for who could foresee such a dramatic and catastrophic weather system overwhelming all the failsafe systems in effect which in the end, failed the safety test.

Houston and its surrounding areas, it seems, has no municipal legislation regarding the kind of environmental site management that would not give legal license to build in environmentally vulnerable areas. So homes are built where floods, albeit not of the type that the hurricane brought on this occasion, occur with some regularity. To compound the dangers involved in the situation there is the placement of a chemical plant in an equally vulnerable and dangerous location.

Given the volatile nature of chemicals when things go awry, the authorization of the plant's location seems fairly negligent; too close to a city of millions of residents. And perhaps what is even more serious, the Arkema plant with its chemical compounds was built on a stretch of highway close to Houston where a concentration of refineries, pipelines and chemical plants abound. How wise is that? When electricity was lost as a result of the massive flooding, the Arkema chemicals began to degrade from lack of refrigeration and some caught fire, since they're volatile compounds.

Flames shooting into the atmosphere of 9 to 12 metres in height produced clouds of chemical vapours from the organic compounds. People in the area suffered respiratory irritation, but the EPA claimed air samples were void of toxic materials, in contradiction to the FEMA authority who characterized them as dangerous. There was "no way to prevent" the explosion, explained Arkema's CEO Rich Rowe.

When Arkema submitted a required risk management plan to the EPA resulting from the amounts of sulfur dioxide and methylpropene, (toxic chemical and flammable gas respectively), it holds, it included details about the effect of a potential release. Its 2014 submission stated a worst-case scenario would affect 1.1 million residents over 37 kilometres. Still, Arkema's argument was that this was an unlikely scenario assuming the plant's safety measures failed.

Arkema was fined $110,000 by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration related to ten safety violations that an inspection at the Crosby plant turned up. The violations were under the classification of "serious", having the potential to result in death or serious injury. Houston, cannot you do better than this in ensuring the compliance and safety of your residents?

The effects of a Hurricane of immense proportions cannot but be emergency-mediated, but certainly those effects coupled with an exploding chemical plant could be avoided?