More Scary Chemical Stuff?
My best friend and her husband just moved to Texas. Why, you ask? Because they are both chemists. Why is Texas particularly overrun by chemists? Because there is petroleum. A lot of products (not just gasoline) are produced from petroleum. In fact, there are many, many chemical manufacturers in the southern states. LA has it's fair share (as reflected by the soaring gas prices at the pump due to hurricane destruction).
Why is the topic of chemical companies in Texas on tap for a bloggers union dedicated to things of social importance? Why are we blogging about chemical companies this week? Because there has been another explosion at a refinery. During this year, Texas industrial facilities have suffered three blasts. The first one, in March at BP, killed 15 and injured 170. The same refinery has a second explosion in July but with no injuries. This last one was at a Formosa plant. The Taiwan-based company's US facilities had a blast about 17 months ago.
You can find a summary of the situation here.
I think the problem I have with this week's topic is that, basically, I don't have any problem with chemical plants. What I have problems with are shodding engineering that makes them unsafe. Government inspectors not enforcing building codes and environmental laws / pollution controls. People basically doing things the "cheap" way. They don't know what caused this explosion. Was it faulty building infrastructure? Untrained employees? Or a too-demanding production schedule?
What (probably) isn't to blame is bad chemistry. Doing chemistry isn't inherently dangerous if you have safeguards in place. I don't want people to decide that chemical production is something we need to eliminate because of these events. I think what would be nice is an insistance that money can't buy people a pass from social, environmental, and personal responsibility. I want "rich" people to be held accountable for all of the shortcuts that result in these sorts of things (if it comes to light that being cheap is what was ultimately responsible). I guess in a perfect world.
I like to blog about things that actually have a hope of changing with public outcry. Holding "rich" people accountable has never been very successful. Nor has eliminating shading dealings when there is a lot of money involved. I say, let's impeach the president instead! At least that would make me happy, if only for a short while.
In any case, I really hope that next week we can blog about airlines and their employees. Either the one about the woman who can't ride an airplane with a t-shirt on that degrades Bush, or the one about the AFA union being pissed off about the movie "Flightplan". When are people going to realize we have a first amendment right to say what we want? That is part of the greatness of living in this country. Well, a bunch of our other freedoms are slowly deteriorating, why not freedom of speech? I can't wait to leave... O Canada, O Canada.
Credit: These Monday entries are my attempt to add my voice to the cause for the Progressive Blogger Union (PBU). If you care to read what other PBU members have written about this week's topic, you can look under the subject header "PBU41" at the PBU group at Flickr. Or you can plug "PBU41" into the Technorati search engine.
Why is the topic of chemical companies in Texas on tap for a bloggers union dedicated to things of social importance? Why are we blogging about chemical companies this week? Because there has been another explosion at a refinery. During this year, Texas industrial facilities have suffered three blasts. The first one, in March at BP, killed 15 and injured 170. The same refinery has a second explosion in July but with no injuries. This last one was at a Formosa plant. The Taiwan-based company's US facilities had a blast about 17 months ago.
You can find a summary of the situation here.
I think the problem I have with this week's topic is that, basically, I don't have any problem with chemical plants. What I have problems with are shodding engineering that makes them unsafe. Government inspectors not enforcing building codes and environmental laws / pollution controls. People basically doing things the "cheap" way. They don't know what caused this explosion. Was it faulty building infrastructure? Untrained employees? Or a too-demanding production schedule?
What (probably) isn't to blame is bad chemistry. Doing chemistry isn't inherently dangerous if you have safeguards in place. I don't want people to decide that chemical production is something we need to eliminate because of these events. I think what would be nice is an insistance that money can't buy people a pass from social, environmental, and personal responsibility. I want "rich" people to be held accountable for all of the shortcuts that result in these sorts of things (if it comes to light that being cheap is what was ultimately responsible). I guess in a perfect world.
I like to blog about things that actually have a hope of changing with public outcry. Holding "rich" people accountable has never been very successful. Nor has eliminating shading dealings when there is a lot of money involved. I say, let's impeach the president instead! At least that would make me happy, if only for a short while.
In any case, I really hope that next week we can blog about airlines and their employees. Either the one about the woman who can't ride an airplane with a t-shirt on that degrades Bush, or the one about the AFA union being pissed off about the movie "Flightplan". When are people going to realize we have a first amendment right to say what we want? That is part of the greatness of living in this country. Well, a bunch of our other freedoms are slowly deteriorating, why not freedom of speech? I can't wait to leave... O Canada, O Canada.
Credit: These Monday entries are my attempt to add my voice to the cause for the Progressive Blogger Union (PBU). If you care to read what other PBU members have written about this week's topic, you can look under the subject header "PBU41" at the PBU group at Flickr. Or you can plug "PBU41" into the Technorati search engine.
1 Comments:
I'd be careful with the BP accident. I had heard through my former company that the incident occurred due to an improper shutdown of a compressor (this had also occurred in China)
By
Anonymous, at 11:28 PM
Post a Comment