On a Thursday evening in early October, Brian Murray’s phone pinged with an email alert as he was getting in the car to get dinner with his family. The email had very little initial information; it seemed something was going on in Deer Park off Highway 225. 

Murray is used to situations like this in his 10 years as a public relations officer with the Harris County Office of Emergency Management. He’s been deputy emergency management coordinator for the past year, too. Angelica Luna Kaufman, the County Judge’s chief of staff, called him soon after. 

What was going on? What did everyone know?

Once at the restaurant, information started to trickle in. It was a refinery operated by the Mexican, government-owned, Pemex. There was a chemical leak. Hydrogen Sulfide. Workers had died. Multiple injured. Shelter-in-place. Murray left dinner. 

He knew then it was going to be a long night. 

The incident on Oct. 10 is not new to Deer Park. ​​For decades, Harris County has been a hub for the energy and chemical industry. Hundreds of petrochemical plants, refinery facilities and other industries stretch for miles across Greater Houston, the Ship Channel and throughout the bay. The county’s lack of zoning laws leaves residents living in places like Deer Park, Channelview, Galena Park, and Pasadena vulnerable to petrochemical leaks and explosions by proximity. 

This means quick response and proper alert systems after a petrochemical disaster can be  life-and-death  for community members. 

Houston’s CAER, or Community Awareness Emergency Response Online, was created in 1988 as an initiative by local emergency responders, county officials, and industry, to facilitate communications in case of petrochemical emergencies. Company officials input information about an event according to three levels, from localized to a general warning for the community. The electronic platform has evolved into an application that sends messages to local officials like Murray.   

However, recent incidents have put this model into question. Community members, public officials, and even industry members have expressed concerns about whether relying on the industry to self-monitor and report incidents via CAER in a timely way is the safest and most efficient option in emergency situations. 

As the October leak in the Pemex refinery showed, vital safety information for the surrounding communities can fail to be communicated properly from the time the incident occurs on the facility floor to the supervisor’s decision to a ping in Harris County OEM’s inbox. Shell – rather than Pemex – posted on CAER almost two hours after the incident, and there were long delays in determining what the leak contained, causing confusion and anxiety for residents and officials. 

“It gets challenging,” said Murray. “We have to know about it to do anything. The facility has to be telling us what’s happening throughout the incident. Some companies are extremely good at this, extremely upfront and extremely candid. But that’s not everyone.” 

At the facility

MaryJane Mudd is well aware of the issues surrounding the CAER system. As the executive director of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, a coalition of 75 members and 118 facilities in the petrochemical industry, Mudd has been considering how to improve the application for a while – but with special urgency since the October Pemex leak. 

On Nov. 1, Commissioner Adrian Garcia for Precinct Two hosted a meeting with concerned stakeholders, including Mudd, Deer Park, Pemex, Harris County, and Texas Senator Carol Alvarado, regarding emergency response and alerts. 

There, Pemex took responsibility for not communicating as well as they could during the incident and committed to doing a drill with Precinct Two next year. 

Pemex has not responded to requests for comment from Houston Landing.

“It was ultimately collaborative,” Mudd said. “But there were some comments about the need for our members to better use the systems in place.” 

To Mudd, the application is not really the challenge.  It’s a good system, she said, and it is getting better. The organization had been planning to update it even before the Pemex disaster. CAER will soon have push notifications, so residents can actually get alerts pinged to their phones rather than checking the application every day. The messaging will also get Spanish translation by mid-way 2025.

Ultimately, however, the application only works if the facility follows safety protocols. 

In 1992, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, created process safety management standards that required employers to implement safety programs for highly hazardous chemicals. 

Over the years, OSHA has updated the standards, but the overall rules have remained the  same: Prevent the release of hazardous materials, and if that’s not possible, mitigate the damage. There are 14 elements to the standard, including operating procedures, mechanical integrity and emergency planning and response. 

“Process safety is all about being proactive to prevent those incidents from happening,” said Katherine Culbert, a senior process safety engineer for an oil and gas company. “What do we do? How do we do this so we build muscle memory so that if something does go wrong, we will know what to do in the moment and we won’t be in a state of shock?”

Culbert, who ran unsuccessfully for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission this year, is a chemical engineer with over 25 years of experience in the industry. 

“It’s like those astronaut movies or shows, you’ll hear them say, ‘Oh, I don’t even remember doing the right thing,’” Culbert said. “That’s because of training and drills again and again and again. That’s what we want to see.” 

Yvette Arellano, founder and executive director of the grassroots environmental group Fenceline Watch, says they have consistently dealt with a lack of communication from the petrochemical plants for years. 

“During one flaring event, we drove out to the community because members were telling us about a trail of smoke, but there was no CAER message at the time,” Arellano said. “Finally, when the CAER message appeared, we called the company and they said something that completely conflicted with the CAER message. We said well can you update it? This is confusing.” 

Another time, Arellano said they called a facility with some strange activity on site, and the person who answered didn’t know what they were talking about. 

“It can be really frustrating,” Arellano said. 

When a facility lacks a good safety program, incidents may become more severe until they lead to situations like the recent Pemex leak or the ITC fire, which burned for three days and shut down part of the Houston ship channel. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board found that ITC lacked proper safeguards. Pemex is still under investigation. 

Culbert said proper emergency response can often come from a safety culture. If there’s a culture of employees who are urged to speak up when something goes wrong, that can prevent accidents. 

In the community

For Harris County, emergency alerts are a complicated issue. There are a lot of players involved with different messaging systems. 

If the incident is in unincorporated Harris County, then the Harris County Office of Emergency Management will generally handle it, but if it’s within the boundaries of a city– such as Deer Park or Pasadena – then the city will lead communications instead. 

“We have to let those communities communicate to their residents and we can’t get in the way of that,” Murray said. “Part of that is because disasters are local and so is part of the response. We’ll amplify their social media and be at hand if they need us. If they need help with messaging, we can message anywhere in the county.” 

An incident liaison from the county will be embedded at the local emergency operations center or nearby. OEM had liaisons at both the Pemex leak and the Deer Park pipeline fire in September. The fire marshall could call for a shelter-in-place and the liaison would see how the county could help and communicate that back to the County OEM. 

However, the county or city actions ultimately depend on the company’s response.

After a petrochemical emergency, companies should post on CAER in about 15 minutes, 30 minutes at the latest, said Mudd. That has not been happening like it should in some cases. Some member companies do not post at all, she said. 

For other companies, Mudd said,  safety is like religion and they do everything as they should. 

“I don’t want it to appear like we don’t have good tools at hand, we do have good tools,” Mudd said. “It’s now really looking harder, really digging deeper, and after this latest incident with Pemex, it will be one of our biggest priorities in 2025.” 

Arellano at Fenceline has pushed for an emergency alert system that is through the county or the state rather than through the East Harris County Manufacturers Association. That way there’s a third party tasked with determining issues. 

“The CAER system provides a valuable service, but it is fostered and funded by industry’s hands,” Arellano said. “This system only provides for people who know of its existence and have the application on their phone. I think people would generally benefit far more from systems that are automatic, like Harris County’s extreme weather service.”

Mudd is also considering the possibility of merging CAER with the county, perhaps creating a public and private application so there’s more accountability for the companies who don’t engage with the application as they should. 

 “It is incumbent upon us to help determine next steps and really collaborate with stakeholders to make something positive happen,” she said.

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