Chemical Breakdown Part 5: No answers given years after deadly accident at Texas chemical plant

Chemical Breakdown Part 5: No answers given years after deadly accident at Texas chemical plant

This story was originally published on Aug. 27, 2016.

Early on a Saturday morning, deep inside a chemical plant in La Porte, Javier Ortiz took his last sip of coffee.

He rolled a cylinder across the "blending room" and over to a scale, filling it with highly flammable gases. He filled another as Mike Smith did paperwork at a desk nearby and prepared to leave for the day.

Moments later, there was a flash of white, a shock wave, then flames and smoke.

About the series In November 2014, four workers died at a DuPont plant in La Porte after being exposed to a toxic gas. Responding emergency workers weren’t sure what was in the air. The surrounding community wasn’t, either. This Houston Chronicle investigation explores how another fatal mistake could have the largest consequences and probes the regulatory failures that put us in jeopardy. Click here to read the series.

Smith was trapped for more than six minutes. His eyelids and ears melted off.

He crawled out of the rubble at the Air Liquide specialty gas plant as a cloud of black smoke mushroomed toward Beltway 8.

Paramedics tried to load him onto a helicopter, but he refused until they let him call his wife.

"I love you, baby," he said to Robyn. "I promise it will be OK."

Over the weeks and months that followed, as Smith fought for his life, investigators from various agencies and the company itself would try to discover what went wrong that morning.

But the one agency with a specific mandate to investigate chemical accidents that result "in a fatality, serious injury, or substantial property damages" did not send anyone to La Porte.

Much like the National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's mission is to find out what caused an accident and make recommendations to prevent future ones. Unlike the NTSB, which investigates about 2,500 accidents a year, the CSB deploys to only a handful, about 4 percent of fatalities.

When deaths come in ones and twos, as they usually do, the public rarely learns what happened, and lessons aren't applied that could save lives.

"It's tragic," said Beth Rosenberg, an assistant professor at Tufts University School of Medicine who joined the CSB shortly before the explosion in La Porte.

The search for answers at Air Liquide began almost immediately, with Ortiz still missing and without the federal government's designated experts.

***

The La Porte Fire Department arrived shortly after the 7:38 a.m. explosion on Feb. 9, 2013. Firefighters were unsure what was in the room where plant workers mixed gases. There were more explosions. La Porte called the Harris County Fire Marshal for help.

The director of the Houston office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration heard about the explosion on the news and sent someone out to the 60-acre plant off West Fairmont Parkway, about 30 minutes southeast of Houston.

Air Liquide hired lawyers within two hours. They sat down with employees and investigators that afternoon.

According to OSHA records, Air Liquide's safety director said the specialty gas plant wasn't required to file a risk management plan with the Environmental Protection Agency because its chemicals didn't reach a "threshold quantity."

Actually, Air Liquide had enough flammable liquid at its complex in 2012 to require such a plan, EPA records show.

Capt. Dean Hensley, with the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office, briefed the media at 5:14 p.m. One injured, one still unaccounted for, he told reporters. A K-9 team had been called in. Hensley sat down with Ortiz's relatives at a hotel near the plant. Ortiz came from a big, Catholic family and loved playing superheroes with his kids: Daniella, 7; Gabriel, 5; and Tony, 3. His wife, Julie, was a teacher.

Hensley gave them his business card and promised to keep them posted.

Then he went back to Air Liquide. Twisted metal and exploded cylinders littered the cement floor. The search dogs had been drawn to a pile of debris, but firefighters were having trouble getting close.

Hensley ducked under a large beam, then climbed over pipes. He lifted a cylinder and saw a torso and legs. He crawled around until he found a head. Hensley called in the fatality at 6:33 p.m.

***

Robyn Smith waited for hours to see her husband in the Blocker Burn Unit at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. When they finally called her back, Mike was in the hospital bed, with breathing tubes. He tried to sit up. His skull was exposed, she said.

Robyn fell to the floor, crying.

God, just don't take him, she prayed. Don't take him.

She panicked when he wouldn't stop tugging at the tubes and yelled at him to stop.

She wasn't prepared for this.

"You promised me it would be OK," she cried. "You promised me!"

Mike had been burned over close to 80 percent of his body, most of it third- and fourth-degree.

Later that day, Robyn told an investigator with the fire marshal's office what a burn surgeon had said initially, that there was a 103 percent chance her husband would die. Once he found out it was a chemical fire, he made it a 130 percent chance, she said.

The investigator asked a few more questions, thanked her and left.

***

The EPA sent Air Liquide its first request for information about the explosion — some 24 questions — three days afterward. The agency often looks for risk management problems after an accident. OSHA typically investigates on behalf of workers.

Had the company pinpointed what caused the accident? the EPA asked. What measures did it take to fix problems it identified? What emergency response measures were taken to minimize hazards?

***

Four days after the explosion, Ortiz was eulogized at Holy Rosary Catholic Church, where he volunteered as a math and science tutor. He was remembered as a doting dad and husband. His obituary quoted his life motto: "It's OK, don't worry."

That day, the fire marshal's office sent another investigator to Galveston. Mike was in surgery at that time, a social worker said, and not doing well. The investigator asked to talk to Robyn, but he was told she was in "no condition to talk to anyone."

Mike and Robyn had been living together for eight years by then. They had a 4-year-old daughter, Payton, and Karlee, who was 10. Karlee's biological dad had died 12 days before her first birthday. He and Mike were close, since they were kids, and after he died, Mike checked on Robyn from time to time.

They started dating about two years later. She loved that they were friends first, and that he was so good with Karlee.

Soon, she was a daddy's girl, Robyn said.

Karlee turned 11 a week after the explosion. She cried as she blew out her birthday candles.

Robyn tried to stay hopeful as Mike's infection grew resistant to more and more antibiotics. She smelled the infected flesh, the silver nitrate and the bleach.

Air Liquide filed a risk management plan with the EPA. It also responded to the EPA's questions about the explosion.

The internal investigation was still under way. There were no "findings, conclusions or recommendations" to report, the company wrote.

Days later, nearly two months after the explosion, Robyn posted on Facebook that Mike was no longer responsive. She hoped it might be the pain medication, or maybe he'd just gone off somewhere in his mind to escape. "Please, Please pray."

The doctor said once all the skin grafts had taken and closed, the bacteria would die. An antibiotic just needed to keep working long enough for that to happen.

Robyn missed the girls. The girls missed them both. Payton started sucking her thumb again.

Robyn was terrified of how Mike would feel when he saw himself for the first time, of how the girls would react when they saw him, of falling behind on the bills.

At one point, he became alert enough to start mouthing words. A week later, doctors temporarily deflated his tracheotomy tube. He coughed and gasped. The alarm went off. Then he calmed down and counted to three and looked at his wife.

"I love you," he said.

***

Around this time, the CSB deployed to the explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that killed 15.

It sent investigators that summer to Geismar, La., after a fire and explosion killed two workers.

It did not send anyone to Donaldsonville, La., that June after an explosion at a nitrogen plant killed one worker and injured seven or head to Springdale, Ark., after a fire broke out at a recycling plant and a worker died.

Rosenberg, the professor who joined the CSB that year, said it was clear to her that the agency would never have enough resources to investigate every serious accident. The CSB has only 20 investigators and a 2016 budget of $11 million, less than J.J. Watt's annual salary.

Rosenberg wanted the agency to take a scientific approach and analyze the causes of fatal accidents to see if patterns emerged.

Other board members, she said, seemed more interested in investigating only the accidents that attracted the most publicity.

Her push for the comprehensive study of fatalities got no traction.

"Studies generally don't get a lot of media attention," she said.

***

One hundred and nine days after the Air Liquide accident, the Harris County Fire Marshal closed the investigation. The explosion was the "result of a detonation of confined fuel gas within the free standing cylinder pressure vessel resting on the scale in front of Manifold #2," where Ortiz was working.

"The initiating cause of the detonation is unknown," the investigator wrote.

An Air Liquide spokeswoman, Heather L. Browne, recently declined to answer questions and instead issued a statement that called it "a tragic and difficult time for our employees and the families of those involved."

Browne said the company "cooperated fully with federal and state law enforcement officials, including OSHA."

OSHA records tell a different story.

OSHA filed a subpoena in the spring of 2013, seeking dozens of company records. The OSHA investigator noted in a report that Susan Amodeo Cathey, Air Liquide's "point-of-contact," had stopped responding to emails or calls within a month of the explosion. Air Liquide employees told OSHA Cathey was out of the country.

On June 6, an OSHA investigator spotted a big tank at the plant from a distance and asked what it was. Hydrogen, he was told.

On June 21, OSHA issued another subpoena for the operating capacity of the tank, among other things.

On July 3, an investigator went to the plant looking for more information on the hydrogen but was "denied entry," according to OSHA.

An OSHA investigator tried to interview Mike Smith, but he was still in the burn unit at UTMB and hadn't talked to his wife or attorney about what happened.

All the employees working at the specialty gas plant on the day of the explosion were sent to other Air Liquide facilities or started working for other companies, the OSHA investigator noted.

On Aug. 5, OSHA closed its investigation without interviewing the surviving witness or issuing any citations.

Two weeks later, the EPA sent Air Liquide another batch of questions. What was the result of the internal investigation, the agency asked again. What measures had Air Liquide taken in response to its findings?

Mike Smith with his family before an explosion at Air Liquide in 2013 burned his whole body. Courtesy Mike Smith Mike Smith with his family before an explosion at Air Liquide in 2013 burned his whole body. Courtesy Mike Smith Photo: Courtesy Mike Smith Photo: Courtesy Mike Smith Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close Chemical Breakdown part 5 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

***

Later that summer, Mike Smith was transferred to Memorial Hermann's rehab hospital.

Before surgery No. 20, he woke up terrified.

"Surgery for what?" he asked. "How many is this?"

Robyn told him.

Mike started to cry. Some of the surgeries had lasted 15 hours.

That October, Air Liquide responded to the EPA's latest questions. The company objected to the request for a copy of its internal investigation, saying it was still "ongoing."

Smith rallied and fought off the infections.

In November, he went home.

He receives workman's compensation, but lost his job, Robyn said. Some medications were covered; some weren't, she said. Robyn lost her teaching job trying to take care of him.

That spring, on April 22, 2014, the EPA sent the company another request for information. To the best of your knowledge, the agency asked, what caused the explosion?

Nearly a month later, 437 days after the explosion, the company responded.

"Air Liquide cannot identify the specific cause of the cylinder explosion, and the investigation of the explosion is ongoing," the company's lawyers wrote.

On May 31, 2014, after 17 months on the CSB board, Rosenberg resigned to return to Tufts because she felt the CSB was dysfunctional.

"I'm looking forward to going back to an academic environment where open debate is valued," she said at the time.

That June, a congressional investigation found an agency in "crisis."

Then-CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso blamed the budget.

"We are a very small agency charged with a mission of investigating far more accidents than we have the resources to tackle," he said.

That July, an explosion in Marion, Ind., killed a worker. CSB did not respond.

It sent a team to Moss Point, Miss., after a tank explosion killed a worker and injured another.

In August, two people died in an explosion in Granite City, Ill. CSB did not respond.

That September, there was a deadly explosion at a steel mill in Fairfield, Ala. CSB did not respond.

The agency did investigate a leak at a DuPont plant in La Porte that killed four that November, though it has yet to issue a final report.

On March 9, 2015, the CSB sent a team to Torrance, Calif., to investigate an explosion at an ExxonMobil refinery that had happened more than a week earlier.

Seventeen days later, Moure-Eraso resigned.

He was replaced by a board chair who, according to a report released by the Inspector General this summer, has improved morale.

The new chairwoman says, given the small staff and small budget, that the CSB has to prioritize which accidents it investigates.

The IG report found that the CSB investigated only two of 49 fatal incidents in 2013, the same ratio the next year and one of 27 in 2015.

***

A few days after school let out this summer, Robyn baked homemade kolaches in their Pearland home.

Mike wore an Elvis T-shirt and gym shorts as Robyn squeezed his arm and guided a needle, trying to find a vein to test his blood sugar level. She gently pushed through scar tissue near his wrist and squeezed, but nothing came out.

"I'm probably going to have to stick you again," she apologized.

Payton sat at the kitchen table, drinking chocolate milk and wiggling a loose front tooth, her third. She wanted it out.

"I can hook it to my remote control truck," Mike joked.

They laughed.

Mike doesn't like the stares in public. He only looks in the mirror, he said, when he has to shave. The fire took decades off his life expectancy, he said, and put him at high risk for blindness, deafness and skin cancer.

He still doesn't know what caused the explosion. The company has not publicly released the results of its internal investigation, and he's never talked to any investigator from any agency.

"It would be nice if they came out and said what they found," Mike said. "I don't want to see it happen to anybody else."

Everything is different than before the explosion, Robyn said. That life is gone. But she still sees the love of her life when she looks at Mike. They're trying to have another baby. Somehow, she said, he managed to keep his promise.

***

Read part 6: Houston Fire Dept. doesn't know where dangerous chemicals are

***

Postscript:

A Freedom of Information Act request by the Chronicle to the CSB turned up only one page on the Air Liquide explosion. It was a copy of a TV news story posted the day after the accident.

The EPA is still investigating, according to a top enforcement official in the Dallas office, who declined to provide more information.

The agency released hundreds of pages of records to the Chronicle under a Freedom of Information Act request, most of it correspondence with Air Liquide's attorneys. So far, it has denied the release of documents that the company sought to keep confidential.

***

Susan Carroll joined the Chronicle in 2006 and works as an investigative/projects reporter. Along with colleagues Matt Dempsey and Mark Collette, her 2016 work on the danger posed by chemical plants in southeast Texas won awards from the National Press Foundation and Investigative Reporters and Editors. Carroll previously covered the U.S.-Mexico border for the Arizona Republic and the Tucson Citizen. She can be reached by e-mail at Susan.Carroll@chron.com or by Twitter: @_SusanCarroll

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