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Great Unknown Odor Incident of 8/15/21


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Well folks.  I spent a sleepless night here in the eastern part of Clear Lake City with the -at times- noxious smell seeping through my home.

I’ve posted/emailed/all but called local leaders to complain about the lack of information.  Seems to me a leak with smells strong enough to cause nauseous feelings, headaches and the like for hundreds of thousands of area residents warrants much more than an “all is clear” signal from the Harris County Pollution Control agency.

Anyone else dealing with this, and if so any additionally points of contact to really spread the wrath around to those deserving folks who should have been alerting everyone via multiple methods would be great.

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What gets me is they will send a silver alert, lost kid alert or a blue alert for something 500 miles away but not for something that is an immediate danger to us. Personally I have shut off all the useless alerts that would wake me up in the middle of the night.

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I agree with that sentiment @hindesky.  Look, Amber Alerts are one thing, but I’d reason AI could be utilized to make rolling alerts for timely messages.  No point issuing any alerts in Houston or Dallas if something happened in San Antonio mere minutes ago, there’s no way that person could travel that distance.  I suppose the argument could be made that family/friends could reach out to them, or law enforcement and provide information as to objectives/destinations?  But even using that reasoning it would be hard to justify issuing a broad state/regional alert, since most of us wouldn’t know any more about an relative that law could find by doing a quick background search through the FBI.

The blue alerts are political grandstanding at best.  I just don’t see the reasoning, just issue an alert for a public danger.  It doesn’t matter if they shot a cop or a regular person.  Killing is bad equally across the board.

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sounds like the cause was a mercaptan leak from a rail car at the lubrizol plant.   this is the stuff that the gas companies add into natural gas to make leaks detectable by smell.  @arche_757 did it smell like natural gas?  i wonder if centerpoint received a big spike of leak calls last night/this morning.

 

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/08/16/shelter-in-place-issued-for-la-porte-officials-say/

Edited by TrainTrak
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2 hours ago, TrainTrak said:

sounds like the cause was an mercaptan leak from a rail car at the lubrizol plant.   this is the stuff that the gas companies add into natural gas to make leaks detectable by smell.  @arche_757 did it smell like natural gas?  i wonder if centerpoint received a big spike of leak calls last night/this morning.

 

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/08/16/shelter-in-place-issued-for-la-porte-officials-say/

It was much stronger than natural gas.  NG has a sweetish smell, this stuff was more caustic.  I would say it was much more gasoline like, I doubt very much something that causes that much widespread grief across most of southeast Harris and all of Galveston counties to be more than “just an odor.”

 

Typically my neighborhood doesn’t really experience any foul air from industry, at worse there are brief smells for an 10-15 mins on occasion (like 1 time a month or so).  I’d describe those as far “softer” smells than what wafted over the area from 10PM Sunday - 10AM today.

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typically you get very small amounts of the odorant dripped into a flowing natural gas stream to odorize the gas.  if you have a leak of the concentrated stuff, i can definitely imagine it wafting into the atmosphere and hitting you at 100's times higher concentration than what you would normally smell from your oven.  this stuff will definitely make you feel sick if you're exposed to high concentrations.  here's a link to a safety data sheet if you want to read more about it:

https://www.cpchem.com/sites/default/files/2020-06/01564347.pdf

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2 hours ago, arche_757 said:

It was much stronger than natural gas.  NG has a sweetish smell, this stuff was more caustic.  I would say it was much more gasoline like, I doubt very much something that causes that much widespread grief across most of southeast Harris and all of Galveston counties to be more than “just an odor.”

 

Typically my neighborhood doesn’t really experience any foul air from industry, at worse there are brief smells for an 10-15 mins on occasion (like 1 time a month or so).  I’d describe those as far “softer” smells than what wafted over the area from 10PM Sunday - 10AM today.

When odorant is added to NG, it's at very low levels. Straight mercaptan is brutally harsh.

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