Podesta’s Peeps Suggest Ways to Fix Dallas’s “Dangerous Chemical Facilities”

The loading dock at Petra Chemical’s Dallas facility on Storey Lane

Only yesterday, Politico.com suggested that the think tank Center for American Progress would become a major player within Barack Obama’s White House. After all, it was founded and is headed by former Clinton chief of staff and current Obama transition team co-chair John Podesta — so, right, makes sense. To that end, this morning we received a missive from CAP concerning a study it published today, Chemical Security 101: What You Don’t Have Can’t Leak, or Be Blown Up by Terrorists, in which CAP “identifies safer and more secure alternatives for the nation’s 101 most dangerous chemical facilities.”

Reason we’re including it here? Notes the media release accompanying the doc: “Of the 101 most dangerous chemical facilities, Texas alone is home to 27 — one in Wylie, one in Sunnyvale, one in Grand Prairie, two in Dallas, one in Euless, nine in Houston, one in Channelview, four in Pasadena, one in Baytown, two in Deer Park, and four in La Porte.” The two in Dallas, incidentally, are the Petra Chemical Company facility at 2929 Storey Lane (which produces “the highest quality sodium hypochlorite for industrial and consumer uses”) and the Bachman Water Treatment Plant, already singled out in CAP’s 2007 study Toxic Trains and the Terrorist Threat: How Water Utilities Can Get Chlorine Gas Off the Rails and Out of American Communities, which I read to the kid right before bedtime every single night. –Robert Wilonsky