Marathon Refinery Fire Illustrates How Industry Goes Quiet During a Crisis. Recent industrial disaster at Louisiana’s Marathon refinery shows how difficult it is to get information during dangerous events. Thick black smoke billowed and flames rose from two chemical storage tanks at the Marathon Petroleum refinery between Reserve and Garyville, Louisiana, on Friday. Geraldine Watkins saw the towers of smoke through the passenger seat window of a car that morning, while she was on her way to a court hearing about whether another tract of land in St. John the Baptist Parish, where Garyville is located, would be zoned for heavy industrial use. Despite the alarming view, no community-wide alarms had sounded when a naphtha leak started a fire at the refinery earlier that morning. While parish officials declared amandatory evacuation for all residents within two miles of the refinery, including two nearby schools, DeSmog’s Julie Dermansky got inside the two-mile evacuation zone across the river from the plant without encountering a road block. Cars continued to pass by the facility and workers at the neighboring Cargill plant stood on the Mississippi River levee and recorded the scene live on Facebook for more than an hour. .Beyond immediate health concerns like asthma, Watkins and others in the community had concerns about longer-term health risks from the fire. Naphtha is a colorless flammable mixture distilled from crude oil to make solvents and gasoline. Exposure to this kind of hydrocarbon mixture can cause headache, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Repeated exposure to naphtha has been linked to nervous system damage in automotive workers. And naptha isn’t the only chemical of concern in an incident like this — others, including benzene, aknown human carcinogen, need to be tested for, experts say. However, both during the fire and in the days following, neither Marathon, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, nor the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have answered repeated questions from residents and reporters about which chemicals are being tested for. In the absence of information, residents struggle to assess the potential impacts to their health.      https://www.desmog.com/2023/08/30/marathon-refinery-fire-illustrates-industry-goes-quiet-during-crisis/