Thick, black and yellow plumes billowed Monday from two smokestacks at the Suncor Energy refinery in Commerce City after a power outage that caused the three production plants to shut down.
Suncor issued a community notification at 1:06 p.m. to report “increased smoke and flaring may be visible at Commerce City operations.” The notification said no emergency action was necessary and that toxic fumes were not detected by the refinery’s air monitoring network. People who live and work should not have experienced acute health problems, the company said in a statement.
The power outage happened after an Xcel Energy transmission line tripped, Lisa Anderson, an Xcel spokeswoman, said.
Xcel crews patrolled the line and did not find any faults and then alerted Suncor that employees could safely restart operations, Anderson said. Transmission lines can trip offline for a variety of reasons such as weather or equipment issues and those trips automatically shut off power to help keep people and the grid safe, she said.
No broader customer outages were reported.
Suncor officials reported the malfunction to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division and state regulators sent an inspector to the facility, said Kate Malloy, a CDPHE spokeswoman.
The air division’s meteorologists believe Monday’s wind conditions lifted the pollution away from the ground, Malloy said. But the state will continue monitoring the malfunction and will learn more as Suncor files its mandatory reports about the outage.
officials said the increased flaring would happen while workers restarted the equipment that had been shut down after the power outage.
Monday’s outage and ensuing smoke caused alarm throughout Commerce City.
Multiple people in Commerce City sent pictures and videos to The Denver Post that showed black and yellow plumes flowing from the refinery’s smokestacks. Flames were visible from multiple stacks.
Cultivando, a public health advocacy group in Adams County, criticized the emergency notification system for providing few details about what was happening even as smoke poured into the air.
Steve O’Dorisio, an Adams County commissioner who lives near the refinery, said he was taking pictures and videos of the black smoke and yellow plume when workers, who were not affiliated with Suncor, stopped to caution him about potential dangers associated with the fumes.
O’Dorisio has demanded for years more accountability for Suncor and its repeated air pollution violations. He said Monday’s billowing smoke was just one more example of failures to keep Suncor from exceeding its permitted levels of pollution, and he demanded that Suncor officials meet with Commerce City residents to explain why it continues to happen.
“You can say it’s an error, a mistake, an accident,” he said. “You know what also isn’t good? To say this is routine.”
On April 14, black smoke billowed from the Suncor refinery in Commerce City as the facility shut down one of its plants due to an electrical issue. Gusts of black smoke were visible for miles, and the incident led CDPHE to send an inspector to the site.
The company later filed a malfunction report with the state health department that listed multiple pollutants it released in excess of the amounts allowed in its air pollution permit. Those pollutants included carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide, which also created more sulfur dioxide,
Flares at the refinery are used to burn off excess, combustible chemicals as a safety measure. The company is allowed to release visible smoke up to six minutes per hour, under the terms of its air permit.
