GARYVILLE, La. (WGNO) — The Aug. 25 fire at the Marathon Refinery has now been extinguished. Authorities say their response teams are monitoring the area, but residents are concerned with the lingering aftermath of the fire.
Robert Taylor lives about a mile and a half away from the Marathon Garyville Refinery. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
“There was no warning. There’s no system in place for something as terrible as this,” Taylor said.
Taylor is the Executive Director for the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish. He says a better emergency alert system needs to be put in place, and there needs to be more transparency as to what monitoring the refinery is doing.
“We have Homeland Security and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, but Marathon is conducting everything,” he said.
Days later, spokespeople with St. John the Baptist Parish say the fire’s been extinguished, and their response teams continue to monitor and maintain control of the impacted area at the refinery. They say air monitoring results have continued to show no off-site impacts.
“Marathon is telling us now that everything is fine after that horrible thing, we saw that there are no aftereffects, that nothing negative came out of that. The people are not buying it,” Taylor said.
He says he’s most concerned about the poisonous chemical, naphtha, being in the air.
“Your house cannot protect you from the dangerous chemicals that are in the air. You have to breathe air,” Taylor said.
Marathon Petroleum is one of the largest refineries in the United States, churning out nearly 600,000 barrels per day.
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