In Quintero Bay, an important industrial complex is located. Between August and September of 2018, air pollution events associated with odors occurred in the city of Quintero, resulting in intoxication of hundreds of people.
To try to clarify the origin of these events, an air quality monitoring campaign was carried out in one of the companies of the industrial complex (ENAP Terminal Quintero), in addition to the chemical speciation of the fugitive emissions existing in the Quintero Terminal ENAP. The air quality monitoring was performed using an equipment to an EPAS HIM 6000 HAZ SCANNER, Environmental Devices Corporation, USA, capable of measuring the concentration of twelve contaminants including HTC and VOCs, while the chemical speciation was performed using a TORION T9 portable GC / MS, Perkin Elmer, USA.
F. Cereceda-Balic1-2, K. González1, V. Vidal1-2, L. Díaz-Robles3
1Centro de Tecnologías Ambientales (CETAM), Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, General Bari 699, Valparaíso, Chile.
2Departamento de Química, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Avenida España 1680, Valparaíso, Chile
3Departamento de Ingeniería Química, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Avenida L.B O ́Higgins 3363, Estación Central, Santiago, Chile
Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
Academic editor: Carlos N Díaz.
Content quality: This paper has been peer reviewed by at least two reviewers. See scientific committee here
Citation: F. Cereceda-Balic, K. González, V. Vidal and L. Díaz-Robles, 2019, Air quality monitoring to establish and / or discard the origin of Quintero odor events, OLORES19 Conference, Santiago, Chile, www.olores.org.
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ISBN: 978-84-09-22553-8
Keyword: Events, Odors, VOCs, THC, Quintero, Puchuncaví.
Abstract
In Quintero Bay, an important industrial complex is located. Between August and September of 2018, air pollution events associated with odors occurred in the city of Quintero, resulting in intoxication of hundreds of people. To try to clarify the origin of these events, an air quality monitoring campaign was carried out in one of the companies of the industrial complex (ENAP Terminal Quintero), in addition to the chemical speciation of the fugitive emissions existing in the Quintero Terminal ENAP.
The air quality monitoring was performed using an equipment to an EPAS HIM 6000 HAZ SCANNER, Environmental Devices Corporation, USA, capable of measuring the concentration of twelve contaminants including HTC and VOCs, while the chemical speciation was performed using a TORION T9 portable GC / MS, Perkin Elmer, USA. The concentration of Total Hydrocarbons (THC) during the entire monitoring period was approximately 61 times lower than the limit established by the DS 594 / MINSAL, being low even on September 4 and 12, days in which there were bad air quality events in Quintero. Additionally, chemical speciation indicated the absence of compounds indicated by the Superintendency of Environment, as the cause of massive air intoxication.
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In this article we make a comparative analysis of the performance of the AERMOD and SYMOS’97 dispersion models for simulating the dispersion of odorous compounds in the atmosphere. Although there are a large amount of air dispersion models in literature, there are few data bases that allow the assessment of results obtained by the dispersion simulation of odorous compounds.
A fundamental operation performing odor impact assessment is the analysis of meteorological data, particularly wind direction and speed. Such an analysis allows for example to evaluate the number of calms, which may give raise to high concentration values, and to spot possible errors in meteorological data before using them in an atmospheric dispersion models. Moreover, the determination of the prevailing wind direction allows to understand if possible sources are generally upwind of the potential receptors.