DuPont Completes Hurricane Ike Recovery at Texas Plant

ORANGE, Texas—This week marked the completion of the Hurricane Ike restart project at the DuPont Sabine River Works plant. The site’s ethylene unit began operation this week and was the site’s final unit to return to normal operation.

“The safe repair and restart of Sabine River Works is a great achievement made possible by the collaborative efforts of Sabine River Works and other DuPont employees, along with contract partners working together as a unified team,” said Mike Sanchez, site manager. “This was made possible by the focus, commitment, hard work and dedication of thousands of people who, despite their own personal hardships, joined together to safely rebuild and restart the complex operation in this period of time.”

Prior to Hurricane Ike’s arrival, Sabine River Works in Orange shut down all operations to ensure the safety of employees and the community. When the plant’s hurricane response team toured the facility after the hurricane landed, they found a safe and environmentally sound process, but significant damage to buildings and electrical equipment due to flooding and high winds.

Manufacture of products has been under way at the site for several months as various utility and production units started up in a planned, staged process.

According to Carolann Haznedar, DuPont global business director DuPont Ethylene Copolymers, the company made every effort to reduce the impact on customers during the outage and invested significantly in improvements during the rebuilding to improve flexibility and reliability of operations. “DuPont is committed to maintaining reliable supply of products that are critical to the operations of our customers,” she said. “In the rebuild, we invested to protect key operational assets from future weather-related issues and to enhance the flexibility of this multi-unit operation.”

DuPont Sabine River Works began operation in 1946 on the banks of the Sabine River in Orange, Texas. The plant produces ethylene-based copolymers used for packaging films, adhesives, compounds and molded products. The plant employs approximately 850 full-time DuPont employees and hundreds of contract employees.