Is Failure To Prepare For Climate Change A Crime?

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

That's the central question of an unprecedented lawsuit against a company whose chemical plant flooded during Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Containers and trailers there caught fire, sending up a column of black smoke above the facility for days. Now Arkema (the company), an executive, and the local plant manager are facing criminal charges — recklessly emitting air pollution, and a third employee with assault.

Rebecca's latest reporting on the case is here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.4	Maddie Sapphire here with NPR Science correspondent Rebecca Hersher Heybecky.
0:08.8	Hey.
0:09.8	So you are here to talk about something you've been reporting on for years.
0:13.6	What is it?
0:14.6	Okay.
0:15.6	So it's a story that happened in 2017 at a chemical plant near Houston, Texas, and it's
0:20.4	when this major hurricane struck.
0:22.6	We are coming on the air for breaking news.
0:24.8	This is Hurricane Harvey.
0:26.2	Hurricane Harvey barreling into the Texas coastline as a category four storm with 130
0:31.5	mile an hour winds.
0:32.5	Yeah, I remember, Harvey was kind of unique because it made landfall and then it just
0:36.6	kind of stopped and sat on top of Texas, just dumping and dumping rain.
0:42.1	Yeah, some places got as much as 60 inches of rain.
0:46.2	There was a lot of flooding and early estimates of residential flood damage run as high as
0:51.0	$37 billion.
0:53.1	In the Houston region, it has one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical manufacturing
0:58.0	in the world, like these huge refineries, tons and tons of chemical plants that make and
1:03.5	store substances that can be dangerous.
1:05.8	And a lot of those plants, they flooded during the storm.
1:09.8	A lot of them leaked chemicals into the air or the water.
	...

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