Explosion Rocks Houston Refinery HOUSTON An explosion set fire to a Houston refinery Sunday as workers tried to restart gasoline-producing equipment that had been shut down since Hurricane Rita.
One contract worker suffered minor burns to his hands and arms, according to a spokesman for the plant, a joint venture of Lyondell Chemical Co. and Citgo Petroleum Corp. The fire was extinguished within an hour, but it likely would be a few days before workers can get in to that part of the plant to assess the damage and determine what went wrong, said Jack Williams, a district chief with the Houston Fire Department. The blaze started as workers were trying to restart a fluid catalytic cracking unit, which converts a diesel-like product into gasoline, said Lyondell-Citgo spokesman David Harpole. The unit had been shut off last month when Hurricane Rita threatened the Houston-area and was kept off for maintenance, Harpole said. "When we started it up after the hurricane, we found some mechanical issues," he said. "We had been conducting maintenance. Noon was the scheduled restart time." Other units at the refinery have been restarted since the hurricane and the facility remains at 50 percent capacity. At full strength, the refinery produces 268,000 barrels a day of crude oil. The refinery covers around 700 acres along the Houston Ship Channel and has about 875 employees. It manufactures such petroleum products as gasoline, diesel, heating oil, jet fuel and lubricants. No detectable concentration of anything harmful was found in the air from the blaze, Harpole said. 051016 232443 Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The Copyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtain permission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materials if the purposes of display include "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research." Section 107 establishes four criteria for determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifies as a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all four criteria to qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" is determined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does not substantially satisfy the criteria in their totality. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. COPYING AND DISSEMINATION IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/VpgUKB/pzNLAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
