Houston Ship Channel remains closed after collision
MORGAN'S POINT, Texas — Traffic was still stopped Wednesday night in the busy Houston Ship Channel while crews worked to deal with a flammable gas additive that spilled from a ship damaged in a collision Monday.
People living along the shore heard the crash between the Conti Peridot, a Liberian bulk carrier, and the Danish-flagged Carla Maersk, a chemical tanker, Monday afternoon and have since been closely watching the progress of the cleanup of some of the Carla Maersk's reported 216,000 barrels of methyl tert-butyl ether, or MTBE.
The U.S. Coast Guard has said the cleanup and salvage operation could take at least several days to complete. Crews began on Wednesday to remove the Carla Maersk from the channel, but workers first needed to safely remove any remaining chemical from the 600-foot ship's cargo tanks before moving the vessel.
The Conti Peridot was moved to a dock on Tuesday.
The MTBE has residents concerned, because its vapors are so volatile that a big wave from a ship or a storm could trigger a blast.
"It's a little concerning," resident Mary Nell Reese said.
Officials said workers have conducted more than 500 air and water tests, all of which showed no public health or environmental problems.
The closure of the 4-mile to 8-mile stretch of the ship channel means that ships in the Gulf of Mexico can't come into the ship channel and vessels that had been set to leave are also stuck.
The partial closure wasn't stopping the economic activity that occurs daily on the ship channel, said Patrick Seeba, project director with the Greater Houston Port Bureau, a maritime industry trade organization.
Seeba couldn't give an estimate of the partial closure's economic impact, but said it is "not quite as severe as you think."
The Port of Houston, a major part of the ship channel, is home to the nation's largest and one of the world's largest petrochemical complexes. It typically handles about 70 ships per day, plus 300 to 400 tugboats and barges, and consistently ranks first in the nation in foreign waterborne tonnage, U.S. imports and U.S. export tonnage.
While one facility near the cleanup area — the Barbours Cut Container Terminal — was closed, another one south of the collision site, the Bayport Container Terminal, was open, allowing cargo to be offloaded and shipped out through trucks and pipelines, Seeba said.
Various cargo terminals, a grain elevator and a dry bulk export/import facility north of the cleanup are operating and it's "business as usual" at the ports in Texas City and Galveston, located south of the ship channel, Seeba said.
"This is not an optimal place for such an incident, but business is still going on," he said.
It's not uncommon for operations to slow on the ship channel. Last week, fog closed it for several days.
"It's not ideal, but it's something we are pretty practiced at doing here on the port," Seeba said.
To help prevent future collisions, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents the 18th District, which includes Houston, said she wants to see the channel widened like the Panama Canal is, because "the ships are getting larger and larger and larger. We likewise need a same response."
The National Transportation Safety Board's investigation of the accident is expected to take a year to complete.
NTSB board member Earl Weener said an initial review of communications between the two vessels indicated things were routine right up to the collision. He said the ships were traveling at 8 knots per hour, which is typical in the ship channel.
NTSB investigators will remain on site through the weekend.
So far, there doesn't appear to be any short-term environmental impacts from the chemical spill, as there have been no reports of fish kills or dead birds, said Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation. The environmental group is still trying to determine any long-term effects, he said.
On Wednesday, the first safety notice was issued from the Texas Department of State Health Services urging people to use common sense and avoid eating any seafood with a smell similar to turpentine.
"MTBE does not build up in fish tissue, so there is not expected to be long-term effect on seafood in the area," DSHS officials said in a statement. "Recreationally caught fish and shellfish that do not smell like chemicals should be safe to eat."
Contributing: The Associated Press