The Houston Ship Channel won’t reopen until the U.S. Coast Guard verifies that a cloud of cancer-causing benzene has dissipated and oily runoff from the region’s worst chemical disaster in 14 years poses no threat to vessels or their crews.

Oil refiners, chemical manufacturers and grain exporters in Houston’s eastern suburbs are cut off from Gulf of Mexico shipping as the unfolding Intercontinental Terminals Co. calamity enters its second week.

ITC achieved a significant milestone early Sunday in emptying more than half a million gallons of toxic liquid from an onshore tank wrecked in the four-day blaze that erupted March 17 and sent a mile-high plume of black smoke skyward.

The Coast Guard plans to move a test vessel through the channel’s two-mile-long no-go zone to determine whether ship traffic can resume without disrupting efforts to skim gasoline ingredients that spilled into the waterway, Lieutenant Commander Jason Toczko said. He declined to estimate when the channel will reopen or specify when the test vessel will launch.

The channel, which isn’t a source of drinking water for Houston or its suburbs, connects the region’s dense warren of refineries, chemical processors and fertilizer warehouses to the rest of the world via Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Dozens of major companies rely on the waterway to receive crude oil and other raw materials, and to send out finished products such as fuel and livestock feed.

LyondellBasell Industries N.V.’s Channelview and Bayport chemical facilities are experiencing constrained barge and vessel logistics because of the closure but are operating, spokesman Chevalier Gray said in an email. The company is evaluating the event’s effect on production.

ITC crews finally drained about 13,000 bbl (546,000 gallons) of a benzene-laced refining byproduct called pygas from a charred tank after two earlier unsuccessful attempts, Brent Weber, the company’s incident commander, said during a media briefing Sunday.

Source: worldoil.com