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Overview of Formosa Drainage Study

annika
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This supplementary legal document describes recommendations for storm- and waste-water management improvements for the Formosa petrochemical plant in Calhoun County, Texas. The text is a fairly standard drainage assessment. The author describes non-trivial discharge of pollutants out of the plant’s outfalls, which drain into local waters, and the inability of the plant’s systems to prevent flooding from even small storms. For some context on this, it is pretty standard to design a stormwater system to be able to drain the 100-year storm (that is, the storm with a 1% or less chance of occurring in any given year). Formosa’s Texas plant demonstrated the inability to convey even the 2-year storm.

Formosa Drainage Study

annika
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Emphases are mine:

“Problem areas were identified based on the results from the outfall drainage studies provided by Formosa. Thus, all the results in the OPCC rely on those studies, uncertainities associated with those studies, and the assumptions made for those studies, some of which may or may not be appropriate as I pointed out in Supplement #2 [Page 4]” (3)

“The proposed improvements assume that the conveyance capacity of the problem areas is increased 100%, which would be able to handle twice as much flow that it currently does. The results from the Drainage Study are not conclusive as to what storm event Formosa’s system currently is capable of conveying. The report does mention that the system is not capable of conveying the 2-year storm, and “sometimes” not even the 1-year storm event.” (3)

“A 45% contingency is applied to the OPCC due to the uncertainties associated with underground utilities, likelihood of existence of low road crossings and need to replace those, groundwater impacts, other unknowns, and additional costs associated with engineering, etc. 45% is reasonable and in line with industry practices in my experience, especially given the large amount of unknown information available.” (4) 

“My opinion from my July 9, 2018 report that “there have been and are still pellets and/or plastic materials discharges above trace amounts through Outfall 001” is further supported by the deposition testimony of Lisa Vitale, as representative for Freese & Nichols, Inc, that she and her colleagues have seen floating white pellets or small plastic pieces in Lavaca Bay and in the area near outfall 001 as part of her work on the receiving water monitoring program for Formosa’s TPDES permit...Ms. Vitale also testified that she told John Hyak of Formosa about these sightings as well as has sent him water samples with the pellets about five or six times, including at least one time prior to 2010. This, along with the June 2010 EPA Report I cited in my July Report, demonstrates to me that Formosa was aware of problems related to discharges of plastics from its facility since at least in 2010.” (6)

 

further queries

ntanio
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1. In the different instances of PECE (D-STS/TAF/etc.) are the artifacts/essays you have created in once instance available to cite/share in another? For example, how would you link an essay built for VTP into a TAF-California essay?

2. How to navigate the various levels of restriction remains unclear to me. For example, if I want to share and build an essay with a research partner but the project is not ready for prime time, how do I set restrictions to share work in progress? Is there a way for me to do a quality control tests to see how an essay looks to not-me participants.

3. I want to use PECE to build an annotated bibliography that typically addresses Traweek's 5 key aspects of a reading. Importing the citation to zotero is easy, and typically I would add notes to the zotero file, but if I want a more uniform notetaking and accessible bibliography PECE seems to be a better fit. For any given project how should I go about building a PECE essay that would be consistently allow new citations to be added along with ongoing and layered/laminated annotations?

Expectations of data management

ntanio
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Most of my experience is not with funders but with IRB. In multiple IRB applications I have had to assert that data will not be shared and in fact will be stored on a hard drive that is not connected to the internet in a locked environment to protect the privacy of research participants. This may be because much of my research to date has involved minors in and outside classroom learning environments. However even on team projects where sharing data is assumed, we have has to assert that data will be stored offline except during short periods when using a qualitative analytic program like Dedoose.