Return to Stone Lions Environmental Corporation Home Page.The City of Odessa operated a sewage treatment plant just south of the petrochemical complex. The City sold effluent from the sewage treatment plant to the Rexene Corporation. Rexene used part of the sewage treatment plant effluent in its cooling towers, and sold part of the effluent to the Shell refinery for a similar use.
Cooling towers, by the nature of their operation, emit a large amount of water into the atmosphere. A part of the water emitted from cooling towers takes the form of fine droplets known as drift. Given that sewage treatment plant effluent was used as the makeup water in the cooling tower systems at Rexene and Shell, it follows that a wide variety of human disease organisms were probably emitted into the atmosphere from those cooling towers. Legionnaires' disease has been shown to result from exposure to cooling tower emissions in at least three states (1). Measles, influenza, tuberculosis, aspergillosis, and asthma are some of the other human diseases associated with exposure to bioaerosols (2).
Having researched the biological makeup of secondary effluent, we compiled a list of potentially infectious organisms present in the treated wastewater, and human diseases associated with each organism. Click here to see a list of disease organisms that may be emitted from some of the cooling towers in the Odessa Petrochemical Complex.