Iran is not responsible for the Port Arthur oil refinery blast, but that’s no comfort

The Port Arthur oil refinery blast came just after seven on a Monday evening, the kind of hour when families sit down to supper, and children finish the last of their homework before bed. It shook homes for 11 miles.

The sky above the Valero refinery in Texas turned the color of a bruise, thick black smoke rolling eastward into the neighborhoods that have lived in the shadow of that plant for generations.

By the grace of simple luck, no one died. All 770 workers were counted. No injuries were reported.

The fire burned through the night, and by morning, the shelter-in-place that had held some 2,767 people — nearly three-quarters of them people of color, more than a third low-income — was lifted. Officials said the air was safe. They said there was no concern.

And in the hours that followed, the rumors began. Iran. Retaliation. The war in the Middle East had sent crude oil to $94 a barrel, and here was a fire at one of the nation’s largest refineries, and the mind does what the mind does when it has learned to expect the worst.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s office put that speculation to rest. Chief Deputy Donta Miller said they were not investigating it as a deliberate act. The cause, they said, was a heater. A diesel hydrotreater. An accident.

It is a curious word, accident. It suggests the random, the unforeseeable, the bolt from a clear sky. But the events that led to this fire were not written in the stars. They were written in Washington, in a series of choices made over years, choices that left the people of Port Arthur breathing smoke and wondering if the ground beneath them would hold.

Consider the regulatory landscape. The Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program, known as CFATS, expired on July 28, 2023. Congress did not pass an extension.

A single senator placed a hold on reauthorization, arguing that industry could regulate itself.

Since then, the agency that once enforced security at high-risk chemical facilities has been unable to compel compliance, conduct inspections, or require security plans. It has been reduced to asking nicely.

Consider the Risk Management Program. Under the Biden administration, the EPA finalized rules that would have required facilities to assess safer technologies, plan for natural disasters, give workers the authority to stop unsafe operations, and share chemical hazard information with communities living within six miles.

Those rules were the product of years of work, born of disasters that had come before. They were designed to answer a simple question: what if we could prevent the next one?

Now consider what is happening in that same Washington while the smoke still hangs over Port Arthur. The Trump administration has begun the process of rolling those rules back. The EPA’s current proposal would eliminate third-party audits for facilities with a history of accidents. It would scrap the requirement to assess safer technologies.

It would scale back workers’ right to stop work they believe is dangerous. It would end the public’s right to request chemical hazard information from nearby facilities. It would eliminate the requirement for natural disaster response plans.

The EPA justifies this by pointing to accident data that show incidents have fallen. It estimates the rollbacks will save the industry roughly $235 million annually.

What the EPA does not say, at least not in its public filings, is that the data show incidents fell under the very rules it is now dismantling.

And it does not mention that the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the independent agency that investigates the root causes of these disasters, is on the chopping block itself — targeted for elimination in the proposed fiscal year 2026 budget.

So here is what you have in Port Arthur. A refinery that processes 380,000 barrels of oil a day, one of the largest on the Gulf Coast. A fire that began in a diesel hydrotreater, ignited by an “unforeseeable release of process fluid,” according to the report filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

An emissions event that pumped more than 15,000 pounds of particulate matter into the air, along with carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide. Chemicals that irritate the eyes and lungs. Chemicals that make it hard to breathe.

The report says it is unclear if there were offsite impacts. The report does not ask what it means to shelter in place for 12 hours in a community where 71 percent of the people within one mile are people of color and 37 percent are low-income.

The report does not count the ways in which this pattern — accident, fire, smoke, assurance, repeat — has become the rhythm of life along the Houston Ship Channel, where a 2016 investigation found an accident occurred every six weeks.

Jennifer Hadayia of Air Alliance Houston put it plainly. “It’s hard to grasp unless you are living in it day to day,” she said. “I wish that our policymakers were prioritizing public health and safety as much as they are prioritizing industry convenience.”

And yet the convenience of industry is precisely what is being prioritized. The public comment period on the EPA rollbacks runs through April 10.

Labor unions, environmental groups, and public health organizations have asked for an extension. They have asked for hearings. They have pointed out that the same political forces that allowed CFATS to lapse are now working to dismantle what remains of the safety net that was built, piece by piece, after the disasters that came before.

Meanwhile, the price of diesel has climbed to $5.35 a gallon. Gasoline is approaching $4. The war in the Middle East has tightened global supply, and the shutdown of the Port Arthur refinery will tighten it further. Valero says it expects to restart operations later this week. The diesel hydrotreater, the one that exploded, has a capacity of 47,000 barrels a day. They will fix it. They will turn it back on. The smoke will clear. The market will adjust.

But the underlying machinery of risk remains unchanged. The regulatory gaps remain unfilled. The workers who return to those units will do so under rules that give them less authority to stop unsafe operations than they had a year ago. The neighbors who live within a mile will have less access to information about what is stored in their midst than they had a year ago. The next accident will come, as it always does, and Washington will call it unforeseeable. They will call it an accident.

But an accident implies a departure from normal operation. In Port Arthur, this is the normal operation.

The machinery of American industry runs on a fuel of deregulation and deferred maintenance, and the people who live closest to it pay the price not only in their lungs but in their property values, their schools, and their sense of safety.

They pay because the system was designed to externalize the cost — to put the risk on the neighbors and the profit on the balance sheet.

There was a time when a fire like this would have prompted a reckoning. When the CFATS program was alive, when the Risk Management Program was being strengthened, when a bipartisan consensus held that some things were too important to leave to the goodwill of industry.

That time has passed. In its place is a regulatory landscape pockmarked with expired programs and proposed rollbacks, defended on the grounds that industry knows best.

They did not mean to cause an explosion. They did not mean to send a cloud of particulate matter over the west end of Port Arthur. They did not mean to shelter in place a community of nearly 3,000 people for 12 hours. But they did not mean to prevent it either. And in the ledger of American industrial policy, that distinction has become the whole story.

The fire is out now. The shelter-in-place has been lifted. The price of diesel continues to climb. And somewhere in Washington, the public comment period on the EPA rollbacks ticks toward its close, waiting to see if anyone is still paying attention.