Consumables
Sabine River Works Completes Hurricane Ike Recovery
Monday 23. February 2009 - The DuPont Sabine River Works site in Orange, Texas, has completed its restart project following Hurricane Ike. The sites ethylene unit recently began operation 152 days after Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast. The ethylene unit was the sites final unit to return to normal operation.
The manufacture of products has been underway at the site for several months as various utility and production units started in a planned, staged process. Most importantly, the five-month recovery project was completed safely, with no Occupational Safety & Health Administration recordable injuries to site employees.
“The safe repair and restart of Sabine River Works is one of the greatest achievements in this sites 63-year history,” said Mike Sanchez, site manager. “An achievement made possible by the collaborative efforts of the 850 DuPont Sabine River Works employees, hundreds of other DuPont employees and about 2,000 of our contract partners working together as a unified team. It has been an amazing yet inspirational challenge to be a part of this incredible effort. With focus, commitment, hard work and dedication of thousands of people who, despite their own personal hardships, joined together to safely rebuild and restart Sabine River Works in such a short period of time.”
Prior to Hurricane Ikes arrival, Sabine River Works shut down all operations to ensure the safety of its employees and local community. When the plants hurricane response team toured the facility after the hurricane hit, they found significant damage to buildings and electrical equipment due to flooding and high winds.
“Our first priority was the safety and well-being of our employees and the local community,” Mike said. “We worked diligently to execute our hurricane response plan. Our safety systems and processes operated as intended and all of our employees were accounted for and safe.”
According to Carolann Haznedar, DuPont global business director, the company made every effort to reduce the impact on customers during the outage and invested in improvements during the rebuilding to improve flexibility and reliability of operations.
“DuPont is committed to maintaining a reliable supply of products that are critical to the operations of our customers,” she said. “During the rebuild, we invested to protect key operational assets from future weather-related issues and to enhance the flexibility of this multi-unit operation.”