Andrew Maykuth reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer
Updated: July 24, 2019- 6:33 PM
The Philadelphia Health Department measured an “elevated” level of deadly hydrogen fluoride gas outside the South Philadelphia refinery during a fiery accident last month, but the reading was dismissed as a “false positive” and no actions were taken to protect residents, according to a Drexel University environmental engineer.
A city inspector, using a handheld monitoring device, measured the elevated gas reading at a location near the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery complex, according to Peter DeCarlo, a Drexel environmental engineering professor, who submitted testimony to a state legislative committee that held a hearing Wednesday on the June 21 refinery explosion.
“The positive measurement should have been cause for proactive measures to protect residents,” DeCarlo said in his written testimony to the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, which conducted the hearing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School.
The incident was cited by several environmental and health advocates on Wednesday who suggested that regulators need to correct weaknesses in air-monitoring and response plans for industrial sites such as PES, which is surrounded by densely populated residential areas. They said the city’s current network of fixed air-monitoring equipment was not well-positioned to detect the impact of the huge smoke cloud that drifted eastward during the refinery fire.
The city’s health department downplayed the incident Wednesday, saying its Air Management Services (AMS) inspectors suspected the gas meter was not properly calibrated, and requested that the refinery and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency double-check the tests.
“Both confirmed that there was no HF present in the air,” James Garrow, the health department spokesperson, said in an email. “The AMS inspectors took the improperly calibrated meter out of service.”
At the time of the fire, a shelter-in-place order was put in place for residents near the refinery, but no evacuation ordered.
