This book is dedicated to my family, to the memory of Karen Phillips, and to all who care for New Orleans.
1.
Thursday morning, Houston, Texas
Summer
"What's wrong with the flare?" Lynn Dayton, executive vice president for TriCoast Energy's US oil refining operations, pointed to one of the giant, sentry-like structures visible through the refinery's conference room window. The yellow flame should have been soaring at least fifteen feet above its 120-foot stack. The three executives meeting with Lynn turned to look a quarter mile away at the feeble smear of orange and smoke.
Lynn's job had traditionally been held by men, a tradition hard to change. Khakis she'd thrown on at four thirty this morning for the flight to Houston hinted at her long runner's legs. "Is a unit down?"
"I'll check." Reese Spencer's short, white hair seemed to bristle to attention. He hurried out of the conference room with his cell phone. She'd hired Reese, ex-navy pilot and long-time friend, to run this refinery she had convinced TriCoast's board to buy just before it hit bankruptcy court. She'd promised the board she would make it profitable by refitting the refinery to produce more gasoline at lower cost.
Four weeks left. A blink of an eye compared to the time required to find the perfect piping changes that would increase efficiency, make the calculations, bid it out, get the welders on site to install it, and restart the unit, hoping the whole time the fix worked and you didn't have a fire on start-up. A nanosecond when it took weeks to find additional crude-oil supply, unload tankers, run the crude, pipeline the resulting gasoline to wholesalers, and get paid. And you're the only one in this room who cares if you don't meet the deadline because you're the only one who'll be toast.
This too-small flare meant yet another setback.
A group of the refinery's executives, including the two resentful people in front of her, had also tried to purchase the refinery in a management buyout but hadn't been able to raise the cash.
A frown pulled at Dwayne Thomas's tobacco-stained lips. Lynn glanced at him and the woman sitting next to him, angled back in metal-frame chairs.
She wondered if she could get all four of the VPs to pull together before she and they lost their jobs or worse, were reassigned to suffocate in Special Projects. "We want to answer questions about the merger of Centennial with TriCoast. Where are the others?"
Dwayne hacked a smoker's cough and clamped his ham-sized hands together. "Riley Stevens told me he had a morning meeting."
Riley's probably at a banker's breakfast. If he valued his job he'd be here. Lynn had met the Centennial CFO only twice. But in the last few weeks she had heard rumors about his attitude toward women.
Jean-Marie Taylor, a six-foot-tall woman who was VP in charge of safety and pronounced her name "John-Marie," nudged Dwayne and rolled her eyes. "And Jay's on a golf course somewhere."
They're accounted for so your worry is irrational. Hurricane season was starting. Luckily, only a few TriCoast employees had been missing after Katrina. But it took weeks to find their bodies.
Dwayne kept staring out the window. Lynn followed the gaze of the operations VP. An easy-to-read beacon of the refinery's health, the flame atop the ten-story, needle-like structure telegraphed in a glance whether operations were normal. The same flame was still too short, too skinny. Dwayne turned. "Lynn, when you combine your existing Ship Channel refinery with ours, how many of us will you fire?"
What will you say this time to reassure him? "We need everyone. Now more than ever." Except one.
"I don't mean now. I mean . . ."
"Five operators down!" They heard Reese's yell just before the wail of hydrogen sulfide alarms echoed off every tower, exchanger, and furnace.
The three of them jumped and rushed to the window, as if they could spot the source of the poisonous gas. But they knew hydrogen sulfide had no color.
"Where?" Lynn strained to hear over the high whine of the alarms.
Reese sprinted in from the hallway. "Adric thinks the leak is at a pretreater." That's why the flame on the flare is so short and skinny. The control center supervisor, Adric Washington, had likely turned off oil flowing into the pretreater to isolate it. By stopping the oil he was stopping the production of deadly gas.
"How many souls on board?" Reese asked quietly.
Souls on board. What a pilot says when the plane's going down.
"A hundred and twenty of our own. Thirty-five contractors." Dwayne wrapped big hands around the rim of his hard hat. "We gotta go see."
Jean-Marie blocked the exit, hands on hips. "Stay here and don't panic."
"You can't stop us," Reese said.
"Yes, I can." And she could. The safety officer pulled up to her six-foot-plus height. "The operators don't need you big cheese in the way."
After she strode away toward the refinery gate her command kept the room silent and motionless for only a moment.
"Now look at it!" Lynn ground her teeth in frustration as she put her hands on the conference room window and wrenched sideways for the best viewing angle. Pressurized liquid spilled out of a smaller flare and ignited as it hit oxygen and heat. Bright orange fireballs splattered the ground. She felt the glass vibrate against her fingers. We have to help those who might be hurt!
"I can't let my men drop like flies!" Dwayne shouted, echoing her thoughts. "I don't need Jean-Marie's permission to go into my own refinery. Reese, you?"
Exclusion happens. Lynn interrupted, "Adric thinks the release is near the catalytic crackers. We'll detour around them. Let's find our folks."
"You're too pricey a chief to take a chance out there," Dwayne said.
"Taking chances 'out there,' as you call it, is one reason I am the chief. We'll go together. Reese has a truck."
She grabbed a hard hat and safety glasses from a peg board in the bright white hallway. She and Dwayne raced outside to an old, red refinery truck with Reese and crammed themselves into it.
The truck rattled as the former navy airman ground gears. A guard waved them past razor wire fence and through the gate separating Centennial's office building from its several acres of giant, spiky refining hardware.
Lynn heard the normal thunder of gas and liquids rushing through masses of pipes all around. Hot, sticky air swept in until they rolled up the truck's open windows.
The processing towers were clumped in one area. Huge vessels two to five stories tall, each with manhole-sized inlets and outlets, were connected by bundles of either battleship gray or shiny insulated pipe. Pipelines of various diameters formed trellises over the roads. A complex network of more piping, heat exchangers, chillers, compressors, and pumps filled between the towers like metallic kudzu.
Everything had a number. Rushing through the C-200 area, they all jumped as a siren blast ricocheted off every exposed metal pipe, drum, and vessel in the refinery.
"Pull over!" Dwayne shouted. "That's the H2S alarm again. We could be in the middle of another release!"
"We'll be safer at the control center," Reese said. He gunned the engine.
Staring over the black asphalt between the silver pipes, Lynn saw five mounds she at first thought were sacks of blue jumpsuits. "No! Stop! Our people are over there!" Oh Lord, none of them is moving.
Reese braked so hard his passengers braced themselves against the dashboard. Dwayne reached across Lynn to open the door but Reese yelled, "Don't get out! You need respirators." He gunned the truck again and they screeched up to a bright yellow kiosk.
"Hot zone!" Lynn shouted when they jumped from the truck and grabbed their equipment. Rotten-egg odor filled her nostrils. It'll be even deadlier when you can't smell it once your nerves are paralyzed.
"Drive to the control center," Lynn told Reese. "Tell Adric to clear a space near the lockers. We'll drag them in. We can't wait for body boards." She flipped on her oxygen mask making voice communication no longer possible.
Dwayne put a finger between the mask and Lynn's face to check that her respirator was sealed tightly. She did the same for him. His practiced care with this simple safety gesture touched her.
They ran toward the bodies.
Two limp forms lay motionless next to an orange flag at the huge metal drum known as the catalytic cracking pretreater. Another operator was draped over the big bypass valve wheel. Two more lay twenty feet farther. Hydrogen sulfide for sure.
Thousands of butterflies wanted out of her stomach. Lynn told herself to stay calm. Slow down. Don't screw up. Everyone's depending on you.
She saw the first person. His shirt was pulled up over his mouth and his eyes were open.
Maybe they're just unconscious. Maybe the concentration's not high enough to kill them. Have to get them out and start CPR. Lynn pointed to a gap in the pipe near the valve and dragged her finger across her throat. The source.
Dwayne nodded and pointed toward the bodies farthest from the gap, the ones most likely to survive.
He knelt next to a man, Lynn behind a woman lying face up. They hoisted the operators under their armpits and dragged them toward the control center. Steel reinforcing in the toes of the woman's boots caused her feet to splay out and hit the ground. The boot heels scraped mercilessly on the cement pad and caught in cracks as Lynn dragged her. The woman's hard hat banged into Lynn's chest with each step. She tried to forget that the most she'd lifted in a weight room was forty pounds. She tried not to think the words "dead weight."
Her mask began to slip on her sweaty face. Surely Dwayne didn't loosen the seal when he checked it. She smelled sour gas but didn't dare lay the woman down to tighten the seal. If only she could make it to the control center.
She spared Dwayne a glance. Intent on moving another victim, he grunted, his face revealing only the strain.
They were still fifty yards from the cement-block control center when Jean-Marie, Adric, and a man Lynn didn't recognize ran past. Also bulked up with respirators, they were looking for victims, too. Lynn nodded toward the pretreater valve.
The harder she panted, the more the sulfurous smell seeped into her nose. Twenty yards to go.
Reese held open the door of the control building that led to the lockers. She looked over her shoulder to make sure Jean-Marie and the others found the remaining operators. Can't leave anyone behind.
Lynn pulled the woman in, laid her down on the tiled floor, and cradled her head as it rolled to one side. She ripped off the mask she'd put on only minutes before, pressing her fingers to the woman's smooth, brown throat, then to her wrist. Where's her pulse? God, help me find it! The woman's black curls were damp against her head. The smell of hydrogen sulfide steamed from her skin.
"I can't feel anything," Dwayne yelled.
The door opened. Jean-Marie, Adric, and the third man dragged in the other three operators. They looked even worse than the woman Lynn was treating.
"Medics are on the way. They said to focus on the ones we can save." Jean-Marie's words tapered off until they were almost inaudible.
Lynn pumped the woman's chest through her thick blue shirt. Nothing. When she glanced up she saw heads shaking. Lynn kept pushing. "We have to try harder!"
"Christ, none of 'em has a pulse or is breathing," Dwayne said.
"My man's got a heartbeat!" Adric shouted. "Help me!"
Lynn pumped the woman's chest again. She hadn't breathed nor had her heart pumped a beat during the time Lynn had been with her. Probably not for fifteen to twenty minutes before that.
"We have to help the ones we can save," Jean-Marie repeated.
Lynn made the horrible choice she had to make and placed the woman's hands across her chest. Her palms were already cool. She shuddered and moved next to Adric. Her throat burned with the sob she stifled.
Adric's black forehead glistened. He shook the man's thin shoulders. "Are you okay?"
No response.
Lynn tilted the man's head back and lifted his chin to establish an airway while Adric put his ear next to the man's nose and mouth so he could listen and watch his chest.
The door to the adjacent room opened and other operators crowded in. "What's wrong?" "Who's hurt?" Voices rose to shouts.
"Get them out!" Lynn heard panic in Dwayne's yell. The voices stilled and the door closed. The heat from the extra bodies abated.
Pinching the man's nose shut, Adric breathed twice into his mouth.
"Come on buddy, you can do it," Lynn implored.
"Breathe, goddamn you! Breathe!" The big engineer knelt over another body nearby.
Still no response. Adric repositioned the man's head and blew breath into his lungs again.
Lynn heard a gasp. Thank God. She clamped an oxygen mask to the man's mouth. The man gasped several times more and coughed. Every person in the room sighed deeply, as if holding extra air for him. Adric leaned against the lockers.
"He's going to make it," Dwayne said.
The applause stopped as soon as it started. We saved only one, not five. The muscles in Dwayne's arms convulsed.
Lynn stood up and moved back to the woman she'd brought in. The woman wore no ring because safety rules forbade jewelry. Wonder if she's married. Has kids. Sifting out thoughts of her own boyfriend and his children, she clasped the woman's cold hands, then those of each of the three men on the floor nearby. Tears she'd been trying to hold back gathered in her eyes.
"Let's get him next door to the monitor room and wait for the ambulances," Dwayne said. "It's not good for him to see these others."
"But Reese, would you . . .?" Lynn didn't have to complete her question before Reese nodded. He would wait behind with those they hadn't found fast enough.
She and Adric carried the lightly built man into a room lit with dozens of glowing screens. They laid him on a pallet of raincoats.
"Dwayne, have you met this man?" Jean-Marie asked.
"Armando Garza. Contractor, but he used to work here full-time. Knows Centennial as well as any of us."
The now-conscious man stiffened, tried to sit up, and fell back. He clutched the oxygen to his face and took longer, deeper breaths.
"Easy, cher," Jean-Marie said.
After a few minutes, two operators boosted Armando up and led him to the eyewash basin.
"Water's the next course," Dwayne murmured to silent nods. They'd all seen mild hydrogen sulfide poisoning before. Usually the victim went to the hospital, rested awhile, then stood up and went back to living. This was much worse.
The bigger operator braced himself and clamped his arms around Armando's chest. The other held the man's head over the basin. They opened jets and water shot into his face. Armando jumped back when the water hit his eyelids, then slumped to allow his face and eyes to be flushed.
Lynn asked Adric what had happened.
"My operators went out about eight thirty to do a pipe inspection. I can't believe it. Not all four . . ." He stopped, choked.
A cramp knifed through Lynn's calves. A cramp as fast as a light switch being flipped. She stretched up and down through her toes to ease the excruciating clutch, a physical betrayal of the emotion she always had to hide.
After a few minutes over the sink, the husky operator tilted the man's head back and the other rinsed his eyes with saline solution. Then they led him to a shower around the corner.
A squinty-eyed man pushed in next to Adric. His mustache almost covering his big teeth, he was the stranger who'd helped Jean-Marie and Adric with the victims. "Like Adric said, the operators had left for rounds. Armando was standing around telling jokes and got a call-out to the cracking unit. When he radioed his crew chief for help, they notified us because we were a half mile closer. Said they thought it was H2S."
Adric recovered his voice and picked up the story. "After the call, I had my crew turn off flow, then sound the alarms."
"I'm glad you were right on top of the situation," Lynn said.
Turning off the oil had also cut the gas flow to the flare and explained the flare's dimming they'd seen from the conference room, as Lynn had assumed. This refinery still has its expert operators. But what caused the leak?
"Armando lucked out today," Dwayne said. "But he's the only one who . . ."
The scream of ambulances drowned out the rest of his words.
2.
Thursday morning, Houston
Reactors: vessels in which raw feeds are transformed into chemically and structurally different products.
Catalytic cracking: key process for converting heavy oils into more valuable gasoline and lighter products. Average reactor temperatures are 900-1000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Six-foot-tall Jean-Marie cracked open the outside door and pushed four medics inside. "The H2S level is too high for you to be outside without air packs."
The ambulances' sirens were still, but before Jean-Marie slammed the door, sounds of steam hissing through valves and oil roaring through pipes filled the room.
Adric took two of the medics around the corner to the locker room, where the four dead operators were lying. Lynn brought the second team of medics to Armando, who sat with a few other men and women. Still attentive to their jobs, many eyed the computer monitors that showed the vital signs of the massive equipment outside.
Reese directed other anxious operators, who'd taken shelter inside when the hydrogen sulfide alarm sounded, to the break room nearby. He followed them in and closed the door. Lynn had asked him to find out what they'd seen in the minutes before the alarms sounded. She also wanted to give Armando and the medics the space they needed.
Propped in a chair near several glowing screens, Armando rested his feet on a cardboard box. A fresh jumpsuit several sizes too big draped his body. Despite the oxygen, his breathing sounded sloshy. When he tried to stand he fell back into the chair.
Lynn knelt and put a hand on Armando's thin shoulder to keep him seated. "Take it easy. You have plenty of time now."
Adric came in from the locker room. One of the medics asked, "What can you tell me about Mr. Garza's exposure?"
"Normally that stream runs five hundred to a thousand ppm of H2S," Adric said. "He was exposed for six or seven minutes."
Crushing amyl nitrate capsules, a burly medic held them to Armando's nose and told him to inhale deeply several times. "It'll pull the sulfur out of your body," he explained.
Armando seemed to use all his strength to breathe in. He struggled to hold his breath for several seconds but began coughing. The medic helped him calm his wheezing cough, then finished logging the frail man's stats to the hospital.
Lynn watched Armando with concern. "We need to ask him a few questions while his memory's fresh." She hated saying it.
"We'll keep it easy," Dwayne added, with a pleading note in his voice.
"Only a few." The burly EMT gave them a sharp glance and unfolded a wheeled stretcher.
"Got call-out for . . . cat pretreater. Me specifically," Armando rasped. "When I got there . . . saw two men down. LaShawna tried to . . . pull them away." He choked.
Lynn waited until his choking cleared. You don't want to press him, but you have to size up the situation so no one else gets hurt. "They fell, too?"
He nodded.
"You smelled hydrogen sulfide?" Dwayne asked, one big hand tapping his own nose.
"Couldn't. But, odd . . . bypass valve in wrong position." He stopped to catch his breath.
"Last question," the big EMT said. He prepared to lift Armando onto the stretcher.
"So all the gas normally flowing through the main line should have been shunted over to a bypass line but wasn't?" Lynn asked.
He nodded. "H2S coming out of pipe opening we're repairing. Held my breath . . . got to valve . . . closed it."
"You saved the rest of us, Armando," she said, talking past the lump in her throat. "Thanks."
Armando's words raced through her mind, and snags started to appear. The open valve? Probably a maintenance mistake. High H2S? It's a high-level stream, especially since the new diesel we're making requires removing most of the sulfur. But why hadn't the H2S alarm-designed for just this occurrence-sounded? And why was the H2S level so extremely high, apparently higher than 1000 ppm, that it was almost immediately fatal?
"Make way." The EMTs eased the rasping man onto a stretcher and put a respirator mask back on his face.
"You were lucky we found you so fast," Dwayne said.
Where did Dwayne learn his people skills, Enron? "It's amazing he reached the bypass valve at all," Lynn said.
Armando shook his head wearily. "Almost didn't."
Through a window Lynn could see Jean-Marie outside. The tall woman paced from the control center to the drum-like pretreater about 100 yards away and back, taking hydrogen sulfide readings on a monitor clipped to her belt loop. When she opened the door for the stretcher, her mask muffled her words but her gestures were unmistakable. "Get him in the ambulance, get in, and shut your doors. Quick."
After the medics left, Reese came from the break room and stood in front of the open door, listening.
"Damn it, I axed you to keep the door closed."
Jean-Marie spoke in what Lynn recognized as the distinctively nasal, Yat accent. New Orleans natives often sounded as if they'd just shipped out of Brooklyn and were called Yats for their characteristic expression, "Where y'at?" Wonder if she had family in New Orleans. Are they in Houston with her now?
Jean-Marie flung herself all the way inside the control room and took off her respirator mask and air pack, again revealing a delicate face that almost took Lynn's focus away from the woman's six-foot stature. Jean-Marie wiped at a sweaty imprint on her forehead from the hard hat cage.
"What's the H2S concentration?" Reese asked her.
"For true, it's off the charts at the gap in the pipe." In Jean-Marie's accent, "for true" came out as "f'true." "About three thousand parts per million. Too high for most high-sulfur crudes. Even fifty feet away readings are a thousand ppm. I can't believe Armando survived."
Shit, the safe limit is only ten parts per million. We're sky high. "What are your directions for everyone here?" Lynn asked.
"The hydrogen sulfide is below the explosive range, but I don't have to tell you it's still a killer." Jean-Marie glanced at the monitor on her belt loop. "No one outside except to change shifts. Respirators and personal monitors for short trips, suits if you're out for long. I'll mark the hot zone. Obviously it's more dangerous to turn off the whole refinery than keep running so I won't order a total shutdown."
Everyone knew that most refinery fires occurred during start-ups. Oxygen could slip into a hydrocarbon line, form a combustible mixture, find a spark, and burn or explode.
"How long until it's safe?" Dwayne asked.
"When the H2S concentration drops below twenty ppm. Depends on the wind and humidity, but probably a few hours. Give it overnight." Jean-Marie shouldered her air pack, donned her mask and hard hat, and ducked through the outer door.
"I'll put the word out," Adric said, moving to the computer. After keying the message into the company-wide e-mail/voice-mail/texting system, he slipped into the break area with Reese and the other workers to give them the news.
For several minutes Lynn had heard no noise from the locker room, where the four operators lay on pallets. Her chest felt hollow.
She and Dwayne joined the second team of medics, and their slow movements told everything. One medic, a woman with well-developed biceps, shook her head. "They were all dead within a few minutes, if not seconds."
"Damn it," Dwayne said.
Shit, you should have been faster.
"The Harris County medical examiner is on his way," Bicep Woman said. "We need his approval to take these bodies to the morgue."
Bodies.
Plastic whispered its awful secret as the medics unfolded black bags that seemed far too big.
3.
Thursday morning, Houston
Pretreater/hydrotreater: large vessel or series of vessels in which hydrogen reacts with sulfur and nitrogen to remove them from crude oil and refining intermediates like gas oil.
The control center's front door creaked open again, and three figures entered quickly, removing their masks. "We all got back to the office at the same time and decided not to wait any longer," Preston Li explained to Lynn. Preston was Lynn's trusted engineering manager at TriCoast. A statistical genius, he was the one making the efficiency suggestions Dwayne found so odious. Mainly because they aren't his. Preston hunched his shoulders, a posture Lynn had learned signaled his feeling of urgency.
Lynn heard Jean-Marie outside swearing again. So did chubby Riley Stevens, just arriving, face flushed. He lumbered back to shut the door. The finance veep for Centennial, Riley would be redundant. TriCoast already had a CFO, Sara Levin, and plenty of up-and-comers to take her place when the time came. And if he's the harasser you've heard described, he's out of here. Fire him. No. "Sever" is the word you're supposed to use.
Riley pushed out his large stomach, bulldozed the door shut with it, and burped.
"Lovely, Riley. Bacon or sausage?" Jay Gans' aroma of lavender soap offset Riley's belch and Dwayne's tobacco-smoke-saturated clothes. Jay, in charge of oil supply for Centennial, completed the original four-person Centennial management cohort that had run the refinery before TriCoast bought it. They had wanted to buy it, too.
Lynn motioned to Reese and the group of Centennial people to gather in the monitor room. Everyone stood in front of her, crowding around the blinking screens. Tears streaked through dirt on several faces.
"For those of you I haven't met, I'm Lynn Dayton from TriCoast. Four of our operators are dead. They appear to have been killed by a high concentration of hydrogen sulfide. Armando Garza, whom many of you know, is being taken to the hospital. I think, and hope, he'll recover."
As she spoke the men and women shifted on their feet, work boots grinding the cement floor. A falling metal tool clanked a warning. Lynn saw pain and shock on their faces, and a look of the same numbness she herself felt. "My concerns are the families, and you. It would be much more dangerous for us to shut Centennial down and restart it than to keep operating. However, all flow through the affected pretreater and Cat will be rerouted temporarily.
"Don't go outside unless you're using a Scott air-pack and a personal H2S monitor. Wear a full-body suit if you're going to be out more than five minutes. Adric, Jean-Marie, or Preston will tell you when conditions are safe enough for you to stop wearing the gear. We hope that will be about twenty-four hours, three shifts from now.
"All the families have to be told in person as soon as possible. We'll check our files for their addresses and emergency contact numbers. I need eight volunteers, two each, to leave and meet with the families."
Dozens of hands went up. Adric made selections.
"Riley, Jay-call Armando's relatives and have them meet you at the hospital." Lynn turned back to the group. "If TV, radio, bloggers, the newspapers, or your texting buddies contact you, we might not have talked to all the families yet, so have them call Claude Durand in Dallas, TriCoast's public relations VP." She wrote the Dallas number on a white board, and tried to tamp down her dread about the visits. What can you possibly say? No words will bring back the wives, mothers, husbands, and fathers.
"What are you going to do about this?" A jumpsuit-clad woman, one of the shift operators, gestured broadly.
Lynn included Dwayne in her glance. "We have plenty of people here and at TriCoast to investigate this accident so we can prevent another like it."
The operators drifted away, faces slack and shoulders dropped. When some of them donned respirators and left the control room for their stations in other parts of the complex, a gust of warm Gulf air tinged with rotten egg odor swept in.
Lynn motioned Preston into Adric's office, closed the door, and told him everything that had happened since she'd first heard the alarms. She was grateful to have him here. Preston was sympathetic, thoughtful, and hyper-competent. Even his cologne-a leathery-smelling one-was easygoing. When she got to the part about the failed resuscitation of all but Armando, he shook his head and closed his eyes.
He agreed to call Claude immediately, repeat the broadcast of safety warnings for the next three shifts, and arrange counseling. "I also want to speak to operators informally, see if they've seen or heard anything unusual," he added. "Oh, and the Gulf Coast Herald's already tried to reach us by phone and online. I'll remind the receptionist to direct calls to Claude. They don't have many straws in here."
Not yet but soon. Now for Mike. Her boss needed a heads-up. Michael Emerson's official title was Chief Executive Officer, TriCoast Corporation, but his self-proclaimed title was "shit-stopper." Or as he put it, "I don't send it down the org chart and I don't send it up to the board."
Using the phone on Adric's desk, she punched the number only a handful of TriCoast executives knew.
"Mike, Lynn. We had an accident at our new refinery. Four operators killed, one injured, and the refinery's in partial shutdown." She turned away from the glass that separated Adric's office from the monitor room. There's always a lip-reader.
"How about the families of the victims?" he asked.
She explained the in-person notification process and added, "Reese and I will also meet with them after we've talked to the police and the medical examiner. Claude will prepare a statement."
"Anything the families need, they get. What was the cause? Is it something that'll be trouble at our other refineries, too?"
"It appears to be a straight-up accident, a valve left open that should have been closed," Lynn said. "But I have a bad feeling about it. Even though it only seems to be a maintenance slip-up."
"I can't merely trust those 'feelings' of yours, even though they're usually right. Get the cause objectified, quantified, and corrected."
"Absolutely."
Then Mike's tone turned harsher. "Jesus, Lynn, this is the refinery you convinced us to buy for $400 million? The one you bet your career on turning around in a few weeks?"
"Three months since purchase is what we agreed. I still have a month left." He's memorized that deadline. Anyway, with prices so high and some capacity still lost to hurricanes, your real deadline is ASAP. A calf muscle cramped and she jumped from the chair to stretch it.
"Do you think your old guy can handle it? Why don't we get Bart over there? And when will you have my Congressional testimony ready?"
Mike had been reluctant to hire Reese from the outside, particularly since the ex-navy man was not acquainted with, as Mike put it, "the TriCoast way." Bart managed TriCoast's other Houston refinery and would run both once they were connected with piping and software. A contract with Pemex, the Mexican national oil company, that could help keep the refineries supplied for years, rode on the outcome. Reese had fifteen months left in his contract to manage Centennial. If we can fix Centennial.
"Of course Reese can handle it. You know his record for putting red-ink refineries in the black. You have several weeks before your testimony. Claude can phrase it best, anyway." Claude, a French native, was one of the smoothest public relations VPs she'd ever met.
Pacing, she accidentally kicked a metal trash can and caught it before it tumbled.
"Remember you're on tap for the next board meeting to explain your oil-supply situation. You all set to clarify the contracts with the Russians and the Mexicans? The board won't give you a pass just because you're tall, blonde, and the latest wunderkind."
This time she kicked the trash can on purpose and let it fall. It made a satisfyingly loud ring. "Say what?"
"It means be ready by next Wednesday to explain whatever the hell's going on down there and everywhere else in your refinery system. And that Mr. Sierra Club keeps making eyes at you. Maybe he thinks he's won you over."
"Maybe he likes the way TriCoast's refining division, under my direction, maintained a top efficiency rating despite oil shortages and hurricanes." And kept your ass out of trouble.
One more person. Lynn called Angela Harding, a long-time acquaintance who was now chair of the US Chemical Safety and Hazards Investigation Board, or CSB, in Washington. "Bad news, Angela. We had an accident at this Houston refinery we bought called Centennial. Four people killed, one injured."
"I'm very sorry to hear that."
"I don't want to knock heads with you on this. I want your help so we don't have any more deaths or injuries. I assume you'll be sending your investigators. Can you get someone to the Centennial offices here in Houston tomorrow at ten?"
"We're always understaffed, but given your circumstances I might be able to free up a few people."
"They'll have our full cooperation."
"Hang on."
Lynn heard conversation on another line. While she waited, she e-mailed the Centennial VPs and Adric, requesting them to prepare for a CSB meeting tomorrow and to bring any evidence or records they considered relevant.
Angela's voice was warm. "Kyle Hennigan and Gina Vardilla can make it. Jeff's based here and Gina's in Houston. I'm afraid they know the way. They've been to Centennial before."
"Only once in the last few months," Lynn said.
"That's not true. We've been out three times in the last six months. I don't have the reasons in front of me, but no one was hurt. I admire the hell out of your safety VP, Jean-Marie Taylor, but it looks like Centennial-now TriCoast-needs to spend more money and time on your safety issues."
Lynn closed her phone and turned to see Preston's curious glance. "Didn't our due diligence only turn up one safety violation here?"
He nodded. "Everything important would be in the public record. I'll check it again, as well as our private files from Centennial."
#
She looked at the readouts. Red, blue, and green console numbers displayed steady flow from most sections of the refinery. The first catalytic cracker and its pretreater were dark, flat-lined. Like your four people.
She smelled the cigarettes favored by Centennial's operations VP before she heard him shuffle up from behind.
"What were we doing making that much hydrogen sulfide? If it had exceeded the flammable limit, it would have exploded like a goddamn backdraft."
"Ye-es." She hesitated.
"But what?"
"The refinery shouldn't have even hiccupped. This morning you told us Centennial has been running the same volume and mix of crudes for a week. I don't understand how the H2S spiked so high."
"Yeah," Dwayne said. "And I sure don't understand why someone opened that bypass valve to the main line, knowing a leak could kill people."
4.
Thursday, late morning, Houston
Residual fuel oil (resid) contains the heaviest parts of the crude that settle at the bottom of the vacuum distillation tower. Coking minimizes resid yield by producing petroleum coke, which looks and is used like coal.
The smells of the morning's strong black coffee and deep-fried doughnuts filled the cement-block control center.
When a county medical examiner and a police officer pushed open the door, other smells drifted in with a humid gust: the heavy, thick oils that would become asphalt and coke, the lighter oils that would be made into gasoline and jet fuel. The familiar odors reassured Lynn.
A faint current of hydrogen sulfide also trailed in, provoking her apprehension. What had caused a hydrogen sulfide leak from one of the deadliest, highest-concentration sources in the refinery, a leak so severe it took the lives of four people? You'll never fix the place. It'll be so long TriCoast for you. And how will you support Dad or Ceil or yourself then?
Thick dark hair covered every inch of the medical examiner's exposed skin except for his clean-shaven face. After he finished examining each victim in the locker room-Lynn still couldn't call them "bodies"-he nodded his release to the sunburned police officer. Lynn's sob caught in her throat.
Jay and Riley had gone to the hospital to meet Armando's relatives, Preston to the glass headquarters building to call Claude. Reese, Dwayne, Jean-Marie, and Adric joined Lynn in waiting for the medical examiner's discussion.
"I think we'll find straightforward H2S poisoning as the cause of death," Martinez said. "Tell me how the victims' exposure occurred."
"The operators were out for a routine pipe inspection," Adric replied, knotting his mahogany-colored hands together.
"What kind of safety training does Centennial require?" Martinez asked.
Jean-Marie spoke up. "Same as everyone else on the Channel, cher. Daily safety meetings. Weekly review of common or new hazards. H2S accident response training once every three months. But Dwayne, did you change crudes, maybe to West Texas Sour?"
West Texas Sour contained more sulfur than many other crude oils, so when it was refined it produced more deadly hydrogen sulfide. Even so, Lynn thought, none of the gas should have been leaking from the open hole in the pipe. We can't explain that with a variation in crudes. Is Jean-Marie redirecting the inquiry because she made a mistake?
Adric replied to Jean-Marie's question. "We're running the same mix we have for the last week. 30,000 barrels a day each of Ecuadorian Oriente, Arab Medium, and Kuwaiti Export. 10,000 a day of Qatari Dukhan to top off."
Lynn helped Adric hoist the control center's respirators onto a shelf, their hands aligning them precisely with the edge. Lynn placed the ones she and Dwayne had used with them. All of the respirators would have to be checked to make sure they were still intact, with no rips or leaks, before they could be used again.
"How about the H2S alarms and analyzers?" Martinez asked. "Are they in good shape? What are their detectable limits?" Lynn was glad for the medical examiner's no-nonsense questions.
"F'true the detectable limit is one part per billion with a response time of ten seconds," Jean-Marie fired back, as if she had answered the question many times before. But the rest of her reply surprised Lynn. "But Adric had to manually sound the H2S alarm. That shouldn't have happened."
"We should look at the alarm," Lynn said.
"Right now," Martinez agreed.
"Use the self-contained breathing apparatus so we can talk," Jean-Marie said. "In the closet behind you."
"Scuba?" Dwayne snorted. "I don't see any water around here."
"Same idea, lets us breathe and talk, but we'll be in toxic gas instead of water."
"Toxic. My favorite," he mumbled.
A man with a wispy red mustache appeared, seemingly from nowhere. Though he wore a Centennial security guard's uniform he didn't look old enough to buy beer.
"Farrell Isos, with security," the man told Martinez. "I'll come with you to take fingerprints and make sure the police get a copy of the report. It may help the investigation if the fingerprints belong to one of the operators who died."
Farrell's quite security conscious. Good.
"It was an accident," Dwayne protested.
Was it? Who reset the damn bypass valve? Dwayne?
The six put on facepieces like those in the respirators they had just used, then strapped pressurized air cylinders onto their backs. Jean-Marie checked each person's sealing flange to make sure the mask fit tightly and showed them how to use the speaking diaphragm. Recalling how her mask leaked before, Lynn checked it for a tight fit to her face. They walked into the hot, sticky morning and ducked under the tape cordoning off the pretreater.
"Show me where you found the victims," Martinez instructed, his voice ghostly.
Adric pointed. "Armando Garza, the one who survived, was right here on top of the valve wheel. I can't believe he closed it before he passed out."
Nor do I. Did Armando really get a call?
"Two other operators were close to the valve and two were about twenty feet away," Lynn added, remembering the scene.
Farrell put on gloves and carefully lifted the orange tag from the valve.
Lynn bent closer. The scrawl on the tag, instead of describing its required position, showed a series of illegible scratches. Not good.
Adric swung around to a gap in the pipe with freshly cut edges. At the gap, the pipe ran parallel to the ground, about seven feet high. Since gaseous hydrogen sulfide is denser than air, the gas had pooled below the pipe and concentrated even more.
Dwayne poked toward the gap with his mechanical pencil.
"Because the bypass valve was out of position, not all the hydrogen sulfide flowed to the bypass line," Jean-Marie said, indicating the gap again. "Some headed down this pipe and out into the air."
The hydrogen sulfide alarm was mounted about six feet west of the pretreater and a foot off the ground. Shifting her air cylinder around, Lynn kneeled and planted her arms on the cement to look more closely at it.
"Get up!" Jean-Marie shouted, the speaking diaphragm magnifying and distorting her voice into a tinny shout. "That's where the concentration is worst."
"I have to see this." Lynn bent her head to examine the underside of the alarm. Nothing wrong, nothing out of place. "You're certain the alarm didn't sound in the control center?"
"No," Adric said. They could hear his heavy breathing. Lynn wondered if she should have allowed him out here after all the exertion he put into resuscitating Armando.
The medical examiner crouched near Lynn and made the same examination she had. "I don't see anything visibly wrong either."
His confirmation disturbed her. "How about you, Farrell? Does Security have a log of anything unusual?"
His red head shook as he finished dusting the bypass valve, PT416. "I had the midnight-to-eight shift. All fine."
Jean-Marie turned to Reese. "If you want to examine the rest of the equipment, wait until tomorrow when H2S levels aren't so dangerous. You won't have to wear these or worry about running out of air."
"You're a good safety nanny," Dwayne said to her.
"Don't you mean pain in the ass, cher?" Without waiting for a reply she stalked back to the control center, her oxygen tank bouncing on her back.
Reese laughed. "Interesting woman."
"She is a damn pain in the butt," Dwayne said, watching her go.
"Can't give it up, can you?" Jean-Marie's voice transmission floated back to them.
With Martinez watching them, Lynn wished they'd saved the show for another time. Jean-Marie reminded her of her sister, Ceil. Same gutsiness. Lynn hadn't seen her sister since she left Dallas some months ago.
#
The heat and hum of computers filled the monitor room, contrasting with the ominous silence of the shut-down catalytic cracking equipment outside.
"We have to get our units to full volume ASAP," Dwayne said. "We're losing money every minute."
She judged the boundary of Dwayne's personal space and planted herself inside it, inches from him. Dwayne stepped back.
"I want this refinery profitable, too. My career depends on it," she said, keeping her voice low and controlled, "but not at the cost of more lives or injuries."
Dwayne's huge hands brushed back a few of his gray hairs. "My wholesalers are begging me to send 'em more gasoline."
"Right now we need to visit some families."
Reese waved them toward the door and the old red truck. This time Lynn slid into the middle and Dwayne took the window seat.
"Reese, take us by the office before we go see the families," Lynn said. "I want to change into a suit."
The drive back to the refinery headquarters was a slower reprise of their early-morning race.
Racks of overhead pipes cast cool shadows. Lynn had the comforting feeling of enclosure from multi-story towers, pipes, compressors, and chillers. She felt the rich heat of black carbon atoms packed together, waiting to be separated, combined, and made more palatable to cars, trucks, jet engines, and industrial generators. Especially cars.
Reese said, "Lynn, I need your direct involvement. The map of what you hired me to do has changed. Help us find out what happened."
For twenty years she'd known and liked Reese, a contemporary of her father, who now ailed with emphysema. When she was a student living with flying cockroaches in a New Orleans shotgun house she'd worked for the ex-navy man at his Mississippi River company to pay her Tulane tuition. Lynn had kept in touch with Reese during her many moves and rapid promotions through TriCoast. Meanwhile, he turned two more refineries profitable. When the board of directors approved her plan to acquire Centennial her first call was to Reese. He agreed to head it up until it could be connected with Bart's refinery a few miles away on the Houston Ship Channel.
Now she felt squeezed in the middle in more ways than one. "I have ten meetings scheduled early next week, including one with the board of directors."
Reese glared at her with narrowed, icy eyes she'd seen only a few times. "Nothing you're doing is more important than the safety of the people here."
She felt her shoulders stiffen. With a motion indicating Dwayne, she said, "He and I just had this discussion, with me sounding like you. But TriCoast has several experts who can help, starting with Preston Li. I'll get other folks lined up."
"I don't think we want anybody else unless they can do heavy lifting." Dwayne banged his fist on the passenger-side window. "Hell, if our own people had been working instead of contractors, this wouldn't have happened."
"You're forgetting who closed that valve." Lynn slid her elbows back against the seat. Both men moved to give her more room.
"Oh hell, Armando used to be one of us, so he's different," Dwayne said.
Reese avoided the lingering hydrogen sulfide gas by driving the long way to the gate, past the blending and packaging warehouse, past the alkylation spires and reformers, near the white, twenty-foot-diameter, bulbous liquefied gas spheres.
"A world traveler like Lynn probably doesn't even have a Texas engineer's license," Dwayne grumbled. "And I don't have time for endless analysis and approval meetings with a bunch of TriCoast suits."
"I don't have time for them either," Lynn shot back. "I've had my professional engineer's license for several years. What about you? Is yours current?"
He blinked. "Of course."
"Dwayne." Lynn spoke slowly so he wouldn't mistake her meaning. "I have a lot on the line here. So do you. We have to play on the same side to figure out what caused this apparent accident. If you're not with me, find another team. Now."
He didn't respond.
"Think it over." She knew he wouldn't change his mind about her or accept the TriCoast acquisition of his refinery during the next few minutes. He's an important player. But he's gotta get his head in the game. She heard the routine screech of 200-pound-pressure steam escaping from a valve and longed for the same relief.
"Let me off here," Dwayne said before they reached the security guardhouse. "I need to talk to the crude-storage operators."
She waited until he'd shut-more like slammed-the door. Evidently the need for relief was mutual. "Tell me he's not always so difficult."
"He kept this refinery together when there wasn't any money to do it. It would be one bent, grounded piece of metal if not for him." Reese turned the truck toward Centennial's office building. "Scary stuff is happening in his personal life. His wife has been in and out of the hospital several times with breast cancer."
Lynn felt as if she'd been punched. "I'm sorry to hear that." The ache of losing her mother to bone cancer gripped her chest and she had to remember to breathe.
#
Reese knew his way around the neighborhoods where the dead operators had lived. Rain drummed on the Taurus's roof as they drove from Deer Park to Pasadena, suburbs near the refineries with taquerias and Señor Cellular stores that some Houston natives would prefer didn't exist. Lynn's fingers strayed to the collar of her silk shirt, a luxury she wouldn't have dared glance at when she was growing up, let alone consider buying.
At the first house, Lynn and Reese saw confused children who'd lost their father. At another, they felt the hysterical anger of a wife who'd lost her soul mate. At the third, they witnessed the numb despair of aged parents bereft of the adult child they'd expected to outlive them-and continue caring for their increasing medical needs. She mourned with them. She thought of her own father and swore to herself that losing her job was not a chance she could take.
Spanish moss drooping from trees formed a dismal arch over the street where, until this morning, LaShawna Merrell lived. The street looked like the one where Lynn had grown up.
Ragged grass slid over broken curbs.
Her stomach roiled as they parked in front of the small house. Railroad ties framed the lone tree in the yard. Surprisingly rampant bird calls were nearly drowned by the noise of traffic from LaPorte Freeway.
When she followed Reese up the slanted porch steps to the house, her legs felt heavier than when she'd dragged LaShawna's body to the locker room. Was it only this morning? She stepped around gardening tools and pressed the doorbell. It was answered by a middle-aged African American man wearing a black suit, bleached white shirt, and tie.
"I'm the funeral director for Mrs. Merrell's service." He showed them into the living room, then sat at a nearby pink vinyl card table and typed on a laptop.
A red-eyed man introduced himself as Pete, LaShawna's husband. "I'd get up to shake your hand but, as you see, I can't." Two children, one a wide-eyed toddler and the other a pigtailed grade-schooler, had wound themselves around his legs. They're about the same age as Cy's kids.
"Met you at the company picnic a few weeks ago, Pete," Reese said, reaching around the children to shake the man's hand and give him their business cards.
Pete put the cards aside without looking at them. He continued stroking his toddler's back.
"Maybe the funeral director can take your children to play in another room for a few minutes so we can talk," Lynn suggested, her voice as gentle as she could make it.
As if he'd had to do this before, the man in the bleached white shirt unclamped the children from their father's legs and took them to an adjoining room.
She heard the grade-schooler say, "Here's our book about the astronauts, about Dr. Jemison and Michael Anderson."
Reese and Lynn moved their chairs closer to Pete. "I wanted to tell you how sorry we are about LaShawna," Lynn said. "We tried to revive her."
"Must not have tried hard enough."
Pete's arrow of anger reached its target. Lynn couldn't speak, still feeling the vibrations of the woman's boots scraping across the cement. If only you'd found her, all of them, sooner. If only it hadn't happened at all. If only.
"The Hispanic guy lived," Pete said, with as much expression as if he were reciting the alphabet.
"Three other people died, too," Reese said.
Pete leaned down to massage his ankles. When he straightened, his eyes flashed. "You got to find out what happen to LaShawna. She is-was-careful. Sound tense when she call this morning before breakfast."
"What about?" Lynn asked.
"Tol' me she seen some wetback actin' funny. He ran off from the steam shed, she say, when she yell out to ask who he be. Shit, maybe that was Armando."
"Did she know Armando?"
"Worked with him before he got laid off and had to join the contractor."
"Armando seemed as surprised as everyone else," Lynn said. Shut up about Armando. This man wants to talk about his wife. "Let me understand. LaShawna went in early this morning?"
He nodded. "Said they was having coker problems-coker fillin' up fast. It's the wetback's fault. Armando killed my wife. I'll find him in the hospital and choke the life outta him!" The arrow of anger had become a spear.
No one else had reported seeing anyone out of the ordinary. Lynn knew about crazy from the time when her mother was dying. For months she was convinced her mother's doctors could have found the stealthy cancer cells earlier.
"It musta been that wetback. She took all the safety training. She didn't make mistakes." He turned aside, choked, tears slipping down his face.
Their school-aged daughter peeked around the corner. She fingered a green plastic butterfly on one of her cornrows. "Daddy, when will Mommy be home?"
"Sweetie, I been telling you, Mommy can't come back this time." He motioned her to him, encircling her in his arms.
"Why, Daddy?"
"God turned her into an angel."
She looked confused, and her voice rose. "He can't do that. I need her now. Can't Mommy make me dinner first? Can't I see her one more time? Please, Daddy?"
"I'm sorry, honey. I'll go see her soon, but she can't talk to us."
... continued ...
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by L.A. Starks
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Energy executive Lynn Dayton thinks her challenge is fixing the troubled Houston refinery her company just bought. But she discovers she must save it, and hundreds of people in nearby Ship Channel plants, from injuries and deaths directed by a French saboteur. Simultaneously, she fights off threats to her own life. As Lynn deals with chemical leaks, disloyal employees, a new season of hurricanes, and mounting casualties, corrupted idealist Robert Guillard plans to manipulate her through her vulnerable sister. But Robert underestimates his prey...
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