"BTW, anybody here old enough to have traveled between Beaumont and Crystal Beach back when they used to flare wells? It was a strange, unworldly dim-yellow glow at night for miles and miles. Malodorous, hellish flickering light and roar of burning high pressure gases. Dante would've loved it."

I grew up in Lake Charles and had relatives at High Ilsand. We used to go down the coast road and those flares were something to see. We also used to have flares and "pop-offs" in LC all the time from the plants there. Back when I was a baby, the Hydrazine plant at Olin-Matheson blew up and broke windows for 20 miles. They took what was left of the process unit and bulldozed it in a corner and built a dirt berm around it. It was still there 19 years later when I was working as a pipefitter there.