HURRICANE PLANNING
Seven months on from those two devastating strikes, the product storage industry is still licking its wounds. At least one firm, Westway, is planning to implement a completely new emergency recovery plan conceived after Katrina and then Rita knocked out its headquarters in New Orleans. Others have learned to improve emergency planning and inter-company communication. Two Gulf Coast refineries are still out of action because of the storms, according to the American Petroleum Institute's February 2006 statistical bulletin. Another in Louisiana, knocked out by Katrina, commenced its restart process in February but was still offline by the time the API survey was undertaken, accounting for 5% of US domestic refinery throughput. Overall, February refinery utilisation was 87.1% - it's lowest since 2002. Meanwhile, the US Gulf offshore oil and gas industry still had 23% of crude oil production and 14% of gas production out of action five months after Katrina and Rita hit the US Gulf Coast, according to the API. But hurricane damage was not directly responsible for facilities going offline. Rather, power failures prevented terminals and refineries from operating.
