Beaumont refineries and residents weather storm
Posted: Saturday, September 13, 2008 5:21 PM
By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent
BEAUMONT, Texas – With a significant part of the nation’s oil refinery industry based here in Beaumont, Texas and gas prices spiking in certain parts of the country like Florida, Tennessee and North and South Carolina, we decided to come here to see how the refineries would stand up to Hurricane Ike.
As of Saturday, the refinery industry had not done a full assessment of the damage from Ike, it will be several days before they really have an idea of how well the plants did. But, early indications are that they were not flooded and that was the greatest concern.
Beaumont lays to the east of Houston, and is about 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, so it escaped the direct path of Hurricane Ike.
If the salt water had flooded the refineries by breaching the levees in Port Arthur, then they may have been off-line for up to nine to 10 months until they were brought back. That’s what happened after Rita and Katrina. That puts a serious crimp on the oil supplies. There is a pipeline that runs up to North Carolina from here and if that is disrupted, it definitely impacts markets.
But as of now, it does not look like the refineries have been flooded. At least 13 refineries – including plants operated by Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell – shut down ahead of the storm. Experts said it could take up to three or four weeks to bring them back on after the storm.
It’s not like they will be powered back up tomorrow, but it doesn’t look the damage is as extensive as they feared it would be when Ike was a Category 3 Hurricane barreling down on refinery row along the Texas coast.
A lot of flooding, but town weathered storm
And Beaumont, a town of about 110,000, appears to have weathered the storm better than even the police expected. Power lines, tree and street signs are down, but it looks like the serious damage to houses is not there.
However, there is flooding in the outlying areas of Beaumont and that’s a problem. The Neches River flows through Beaumont and Port Arthur and into the Gulf of Mexico. The storm surge in the Gulf of Mexico backed right up into the river and overflowed its banks. So you’ve got homes all along the Neches River that are flooded.
As of Saturday afternoon, the Texas Highway Patrol was out in force on Highway I-10. The road is mostly elevated, but in some of the lower areas, the water has pooled and has created what look like small lakes. So if anyone is driving along the highway at 40-plus miles an hour and hits one of those, it’s like hitting a wall. The highway patrol is out here trying to police the roads, which are getting more traffic as the day goes on.
Barbecue and thankfully, no ghosts
At the Holiday Inn in Beaumont, one of the guests evacuated his house and decided to ride out the storm in the hotel. He brought a giant cooker with him, so this afternoon he set up a barbecue and made some Texas brisket and chicken. And the folks at the Holiday Inn decided to cook up all the food in the freezer of the hotel since there is no electricity. So a long line of guests snaked around the Holiday Inn waiting for a plate of hot food which was some comfort after a long night of howling winds.
A little 7-year-old girl named Samantha told me as she cowered in the stairwell of the building that she heard the howling winds last night and was convinced that the building was haunted.
When I told her it was not haunted, she insisted it was. She said, "I kept seeing people coming in and out of a room on the end of the fifth floor. I didn’t know what they were doing, so it made me really scared."
Well, it turns out that it was NBC News people going in and out of our TV transmission room. So at least we were the only ghosts last night.
Click here for complete coverage of Hurricane Ike
