First Posted: 1/12/2015
On Sunday evening, Allen County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Russ Decker aired on WLIO evening news and discussed the refinery explosion and fire.
He said, “We’ve conducted 73 air samples … all 73 of these samples were showing us zero readings for toxic chemicals and some of the chemicals we tested for included hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, benzene, cyanide; other things like that.”
I can tell you based on my knowledge of chemistry that they could not have found those particular listed toxic chemicals after the iso cracking unit failure. The mixture involved would lack the nitrogen and sulfur to produce them and the precursors to make benzene.
Quite simply, the investigators were looking for toxic chemicals that they knew they could not find, but that does not mean that other toxic chemicals were not produced in abundance.
If you want to believe that no toxic chemicals were produced, then I invite you to go a mile or two downwind of the refinery, shovel up a few cubic meters of snow, melt it into drinking water, bottle it and share a glass with Russ Decker.
