HOUSTON – Channel 2 Investigates has found a problem with the emergency notification system that alerts residents of East Harris County when there is a fire, explosion or other major problem at nearby plants and refineries.
The problem is with the East Harris County Manufacturers Association CAER Line. CAER is an acronym for Community Awareness Emergency Response.
Heavily industrialized communities across Southeast Texas rely on the phone messages and online information provided directly by plants and refineries through individual CAER systems to learn about trouble in their area.
But on both Thursday and Friday, two separate emergency incidents were delayed in being broadcast to the general public.
"I called the CAER Line and there was nothing on the line about shelter in place or anything," Rita Snow, a Southeast Houston resident, said.
It took about 52 minutes for any information to be broadcast via CAER system, and even when the news of the fire was broadcast there was no mention of the shelter in place requirement that had been ordered for parts of the surrounding area.
On Thursday, during an unrelated incident at an ExxonMobil facility in Baytown, emergency response started at 5 p.m. but the first CAER message appeared to have been dispatched at 5:29 p.m.
Late Friday, the East Harris County Manufacturers Association released a statement that addressed Friday's incident, but did not include our questions about Thursday's incident:
"We can confirm that there was a delay in getting the information posted this morning. It appears to be an isolated incident, but we are working with everyone involved to get more information and prevent further delays. We take communicating with the community very seriously. We created the CAER Line as an resource for information on operations in our communities, but we want to remind community members to always contact and follow instructions provided by local emergency managers and officials during emergency situations."
A LyondellBassell spokesperson also acknowledged the problem Friday.
"We are looking into the CAER line posting process. After several attempts to post a message we were not able to do so. We were in communication with the East Harris County Manufacturers Association to resolve this and had a message posted. We need to work through that process to determine what happened,"
said Patti Shieh.