CBRN event in United States of America on Wed 23rd March 2005

...Usually, “you just don't see releases much over 100,000 pounds,” says Neil Carman, the director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Air program in Texas. In Texas City, an estimated 538,000 pounds of pollutants like benzene, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide leaked into the air during that period, though Carman believes the release may be “more than 10 times higher” than the number that BP reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That’s because, he says, BP assumes that its flare met the 2 percent standard but has no record proving that it does. “BP has no real monitoring technology up on the flare,” he says. “They have no way to measure the actual emissions that did not get burned over the 40 days." BP says they did have monitors in place — they just did not show elevated readings of emissions after the accident. "...