Deep in the heart of Texas City, BP’s largest U.S. refinery suffered a fright last night after noxious fumes erupted from the dilapidated facility at five o’clock in the afternoon to sicken workers and neighbors.
Officials issued a nine o’clock “all clear” notice to end four hours of evacuation and shelter-in-place orders.
The still unexplained emergency, coming from the same place where a 3/23/05 explosion killed 15, is hardly a matter for comedy. The peril of America’s most dangerous petro-suburb warrants a serious headline, with a serious article beneath it. Inexplicably, though, local media are either not reporting it or are underreporting it with headlines like the CBS News story: BP chemical leak spreads stink across Texas City. The Fox News story was simply obscene: BP Plant Cuts the Cheese in Texas City.
This is an outrage, by any standards of journalism. When I wrote the editorials for Houston’s NBC affiliate KPRC, Station Manager Steve Wasserman would have howled had the news director let that poor headline pass. The story is of national interest, and should entice many reporters to Texas City, like hungry sharks attacking a whale of a story.
At least a few Texas Citizens believe that their home town is already condemned for the sake of BP corporate interests. Among them was “Izzi Ixxi”, an unidentified BP insider who gave The Iconoclast advance warning of the Dow pipeline explosion during terror training exercises on 10/18/07, and of the El Dorado fertilizer company during terror exercises on 7/30/09. Ixxi is adamant in asserting that federal authorities, Homeland Security, and the FBI have played a role in several Southeast Texas petrochemical explosions, including the 3/30/04 and 7/28/05, both of which resulted in record profits for Big Oil.
Ironically, BP paid a record fine for those two unreported and underreported disasters just recently, reaching a settlement of $15 dollars with federal authorities on 10/1/10. The landmark case received little media attention. In Big Oil’s back yard, all journalists are BP journalists.
Portland media analyst Theresa Mitchell was clearly astonished while describing the 10/18/07 events, about which The Iconoclast had sent warning hours before they occurred.
The warning of a sudden terror exercise in the refinery “national sacrifice area” in Texas came last night; the suspicious blast came early this morning. It would appear that monitoring exercises like Vigilant Shield and TOPOFF is essential to our survival. ((It pays to monitor terror exercises.))
I give details of Ixxi 7/30/09 warning in my summer exposé, Texas City Exposes BP Explosions. His references to NASA are explained by my essay fragment.
