Attack Here
Along the fifty-mile Houston Ship Channel, there are more explosive materials, toxic Gases, and deadly petrochemicals than anywhere else in the country—which is why most security experts agree that it’s one of America’s top Targets. So what's the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike?
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Still, major accidents continue to happen. In 1979 the tanker Chevron Hawaii exploded at the docks of Shell Oil’s Deer Park refinery, killing 3 people and touching off a cascade of explosions and fires in storage tanks that engulfed Shell’s docks and the nearby channel. The blast tore the ship in half, caused two nearby gasoline and crude-oil barges to explode, and filled the channel with a twenty-foot wall of burning crude oil. In 1987 a crane operator at Marathon Oil’s Texas City refinery dropped an industrial heater on a storage tank, causing the leak of 30,000 pounds of deadly hydrogen fluoride, which formed a gas cloud. Thousands were evacuated from Texas City, and 800 people were treated for breathing disorders and skin problems. The worst of the recent accidents took place in 1989, when an explosion ripped through a petrochemical plant in Pasadena owned by the Phillips Petroleum Company. The blast—equivalent to igniting 20,000 pounds of TNT—started in an ethylene reactor and created an orange fireball that was described by one witness as looking like the detonation of an atomic bomb. The explosion was heard 25 miles away, broke windows 3 miles away, leveled most structures on four hundred acres of property, and tossed debris for miles. It killed 23 people, wounded 130, and left a grim wreckage of twisted steel and concrete.
To see just how hazardous the products of the channel’s plants are, you have to read the companies’ own worst-case scenarios. Under law, each plant must make such a report—known as a risk management plan (RMP)—and file it with the Environmental Protection Agency. This information is public but is considered to be so sensitive that my request to the EPA in Houston for the documents brought an immediate return phone call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington, asking who I was and what I wanted. In order to view the RMPs for channel plants, I had to go to the U.S. Marshal’s office at the federal courthouse in Houston, where I was escorted to a private room and watched by a guard for two hours while I read the material. I was allowed to take notes but not to remove or copy any of the information. After I left, the documents were shredded.
The information in the RMPs is sobering, in part because the premise is that these are accidents, not deliberate attacks. Attacks would cause much more damage. A sampling reveals the plants’ astonishing ability to kill or maim human beings. In their toll on human life, the worst substances by far are so-called toxics, like chlorine, ammonia, and hydrogen fluoride, as opposed to the flammables, like pentane and butane. Take, for example, Oxy Vinyls’ Battleground plant, which makes chlorine and caustic soda. According to its RMP, the daily production of liquid chlorine is collected in seven 650-ton storage tanks, and its worst-case scenario “assumes 1.3 million pounds of liquid chlorine [one full tank] would be released and evaporated in a ten-minute period.” The chlorine gas cloud would travel 25 miles before falling below the EPA’s toxic threshold of three parts per million and would affect 1.8 million people. How many died or became acutely ill would depend largely on wind speed and direction and on what time of day the accident occurred. Fatalities are not addressed in the RMP. But based on worst-case scenarios run by other organizations, they could easily be in the tens of thousands.
In Pasadena the Crown Central Petroleum refinery’s worst case involves a “catastrophic failure of the hydrofluoric acid storage drum resulting in the release of 50,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride gas over a ten-minute period.” The distance to what the EPA calls the “toxic end point” is 9.3 miles. The spill would affect 650,000 people. BP Amoco’s worst case in Pasadena involves the “liquid spill and vaporization” of 4,440 pounds of iron pentacarbonyl. Toxic end point: 3.9 miles. People affected: 84,881.
While it is harder to kill large numbers of people in the channel area with explosions alone, the worst-case scenarios from some of the refineries still indicate a serious threat to local communities: Shell Oil’s giant Deer Park refinery lists a pentane “vapor cloud explosion” as its worst case. The explosion “could affect areas up to 1.8 miles away” and up to 5,532 people, according to its RMP. The nearby Lyondell-Citgo refinery also lists pentane as its worst case. Toxic end point: 1.68 miles. People affected: 20,100.
Though the RMPs make no mention of terrorism, they do offer clues as to how much worse an attack would be than the hypothetical accidents they describe. A concerted terrorist assault might, for example, release the entire contents of all seven of Oxy Vinyls’ chlorine tanks, instead of just one. Chlorine is very nasty stuff. In 1915 it was the German army’s choice for the first deadly chemical attack in history, which killed 5,000 Allied troops in Belgium. A number of other widely used chemicals—including anhydrous ammonia, hydrogen fluoride, and methyl isocyanate—are also fatal to humans. A leak of the latter from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 killed 3,800 people in a single night and injured more than 500,000. (Many more would die later.) It was the single largest industrial accident in history and a perfect working model for chemical terrorism. Chemical weapons cost a great deal of money to develop and are difficult to deploy. Chemical factories, on the other hand, are plentiful, full of lethal compounds and relatively easy to blow up or sabotage. Before 9/11, many people in the chemical industry believed that a worst-case scenario was so unlikely that it wasn’t worth planning for. Clearly that is no longer true.
FROM THE DECK of a Coast Guard patrol boat on the murky, dredged-out sliver of bayou that is the upper Ship Channel—the 23 miles of densely packed industry containing 89 large plants from the Turning Basin (where ships turn around), near downtown Houston, to Exxon Mobil’s refinery in Baytown—it is easy to see why the place is so vulnerable. There are giant steel containment vessels everywhere, many of the 10-million-gallon variety. They are often bunched tightly together. At one refinery, I saw some thirty of them within a quarter mile. Huge liquid chlorine and LPG spheroids also dot the landscape, as do the ubiquitous black, ninety-ton rail tanker cars and tanker trucks, many bearing signs like “Anhydrous Ammonia—Inhalation Hazard!” The biggest tanks of all are the six-hundred- to eight-hundred-foot ships filled with such volatile substances as gasoline, crude oil, ethylene, and LPG.
And as you pass by this seemingly endless expanse of industry, it is clear that no matter what sorts of security improvements might be made, the channel still has one big, basic problem. As a port that accommodates 6,400 ships and 150,000 barges each year and countless railcars and trucks, is directly connected to more than 287,000 jobs in Texas, and handles 177.6 million tons of goods yearly, many from foreign-flagged ships, the Port of Houston is by definition open and porous. You cannot lock it down. The Ship Channel is all about commerce, not security. There is far too much coming and going to mount anything like a foolproof defense against a terrorist attack.
Not that people are not trying. In the wake of 9/11, vast changes have taken place in the way the channel and its industries are guarded. The Coast Guard, which is in charge of inspecting all shipping, has a sophisticated vessel-tracking system that uses color coding to distinguish ships with hazardous cargoes from those without. Port security is also buttressed by new laws that took effect on July 1 requiring full security plans for all plants and vessels, detailed advance notice of all incoming ships, information about their crews and cargoes, and provisions for ship escorts and armed sea marshals for the most dangerous shipments. But in fact the Coast Guard has only twelve ships in the channel and four large cutters off the coast and a relatively small number of personnel to handle the incoming traffic. Nationally the Guard has about 39,000 people, fewer than the New York Police Department. It simply does not have the ability to screen every ship. Only one in five vessels is boarded, and most of those are searched only cursorily. Though U.S. Customs has significantly increased its ability to use x-ray machines to screen cargo, only one ship in ten has its contents x-rayed. This is national policy, and it is clearly improving, especially in addressing the problems of U.S. ports. But no one thinks ports are safe, and critics of the current administration have argued that if the U.S. had spent the Iraq war and occupation budget on things like expanding U.S. Customs and the Coast Guard, ports would be much safer today than they are.
Nor do individual plants have anything like airtight security, in spite of significant new investments in personnel, security fencing, prisonlike watchtowers, concrete barricades, cameras, and detectors. A month after 9/11, with the nation on high alert, infiltrators in frogman suits gained access to Sterling Chemicals in Texas City. In December 2003, while the nation was on a Code Orange alert, Houston Chronicle reporter Steve McVicker, a photographer, and a security consultant were able to easily breach security at a number of chemical plants along the upper channel. McVicker wrote that he and his team, in their SUV, were “allowed unimpeded access to ships, docks, warehouses, heavy equipment, and bridge supports.” At one point they drove “within a few feet of a crew unloading a cargo ship without being challenged.”
But the greatest single security threat exists in the form of the 21,000 containers that arrive each day in U.S. ports. There are 11 million containers in use around the world; they are each loaded and unloaded ten times per year. The problem with containers, as drug dealers and smugglers have long understood, is that they are opaque, easy to disguise or mislabel, and run a relatively small chance of being opened or screened by radar. Examples abound of how easy it is to subvert the system. In October 2001 a stowaway was discovered in Italy in a container bound for Toronto. When arrested, he was found with a global satellite phone, a cell phone, a laptop, an airliner mechanic’s certificate, and security passes for airports in Canada, Thailand, and Egypt. It was not clear what he was planning to do. The container had been loaded in Port Said, Egypt, onto a German-owned, British-chartered, Antigua-and-Barbuda-flagged ship. It looked exactly like the 2.5 million other containers handled by the Italian port that year. The stowaway was discovered only because a crew member happened to see him trying to widen the air vents in his container.
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