BP giving a contradictory account of emissions from one of their Texas plants:
Texas City officials—relying on air monitoring data from a BP contractor and the fire department—have said that emissions hadn’t reached harmful levels. “There was constant monitoring going on at all times and it did not reveal anything, although there’s a strong smell of hydrocarbons in the air,” Bruce Clawson, Texas City’s Homeland Security coordinator, told the Associated Press.
But that’s not what officials at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have said. According to the environmental agency, the levels of chemical emissions were at one point so high that they maxed out the monitoring equipment. “Values were outside the range our instrument can read,” an agency spokesman told the Galveston Daily News. “Maximum readings taken by TCEQ staff were in excess of the instruments measurement capability.”
Can we afford the energy industry? Maybe someone should look into that.
