As of Sunday, crews are in the first phase of removing the damaged barge. After that is complete, crews will remove the second barge. LA PORTE, Texas — Cleanup continues in the Houston Ship Channel after a barge collision Friday spilled chemicals used to make gasoline. The Unified Command said shorelines are being assessed from air to land. Crews are also going door to door asking homeowners about the impact on their homes. Twenty-five mobile air monitoring teams are in the field and more than 2,400 air monitoring readings have been taken, according to officials with Unified Command. As of Sunday, crews are in the first phase of removing the damaged barge. After that is complete, crews will remove the second barge. The Houston Ship Channel is partially open for outbound travel, officials said. At this time, it’s too early to know how long the recovery will take.<doc-sep>HOUSTON (Reuters) - One barge was severely damaged and another capsized following a collision with a 755-foot (230-m) tanker in the Houston Ship Channel near Bayport, Texas, that spilled about 9,000 gallons of gasoline into waywater, officials said. No injuries were reported. Salvage teams were at the site on Saturday, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. It was the second spill in two months to affect traffic on the 53-mile (85-km) commercial waterway that connects Houston to the Gulf of Mexico. Nine U.S. oil refineries that process 12 percent of the national total operate along the ship channel. Air monitoring systems have detected no "above actionable levels" of pollution, said Bayport Channel Collision Response, a group of federal, state and shipping officials organized to clear the wreckage and deal with the spill. Emergency responders placed more than 3,800 feet of floating boom lines as of Saturday morning and were planning to lay another 12,150 feet around the barges and sensitive areas along the nearby bay, the group said. There were 33 vessels waiting to move inbound and 27 waiting to exit on Saturday afternoon, the group said Saturday afternoon, with 91 vessels at anchor. The collision, between tanker Genesis River and a Kirby Inland Marine tug towing two barges, halted all traffic between lights 61 and 75, the U.S. Coast Guard said. It reopened a portion of the channel to one-way traffic between light 66 and 67 on Saturday afternoon. A safety zone also was set up that expanded shipping restrictions to light 66 and up to but not including the Bayport Ship Channel, officials said. Each of the two barges were carrying about 25,000 gallons of a gasoline blend stock called reformate. In March, a fire at a petrochemical tank farm along the waterway burned for days, sending black smoke into the air and spilling fuel and solvent into the channel, disrupting ship traffic for weeks. Hundreds of people reported respiratory and other ailments at clinics set up to provide medical aid after the fire. (Reporting by Gary McWilliams; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Grant McCool)<doc-sep>Much of the Houston Ship Channel remained closed Saturday a day after two vessels collided, causing a large gasoline blend spill and setting off another round of environmentalists concerns for the Gulf Coast. The 755-foot tanker Genesis River carrying liquefied natural gas collided Friday afternoon with a tug boat pushing two barges, each carrying 25,000 barrels of product, around 3:30 p.m., the U.S. Coast Guard said. One barge capsized and the other was damaged, leaking a gasoline product called reformate. The channel closure is the first unplanned shutdown since March, when a massive chemical storage tank fire at Intercontinental Terminals Co., in Deer Park spilled petroleum products into nearby waterways. That three-day closure cost the energy industry about $1 billion, experts estimated. The National Weather Service warned residents as far west as Pearland they may be able to smell gasoline fumes, with the most pungent odors in Webster and La Porte. Galveston County health officials are conducting air monitoring and have yet to discover any hazardous levels of chemicals. Jim Guidry, executive vice president of Kirby Inland Marine, owner of the barges, said at a news conference Saturday morning the tanker’s hull punctured two of the smaller vessel’s four storage tanks. “The bow of the ship went through the port tank into the starboard tank, so there was no way to secure the source of the leak,” Guidry said. “Those two tanks were open to the sea.” Aerial footage showed a trianglular gash in one of the barges and a sheen floating on the water. The white bow of the Genesis River bore scrape marks. The capsized barge is intact and not believed to be leaking product, Kirby Corporation spokesman Greg Beuerman said. The tug, which had four crew aboard, was undamaged. The Coast Guard has yet to determine to the cause of the collision. Chief Joergens Reno said crews are attempting to calculate how much product spilled into the water. The channel remains closed between Bayport and Redfish Island, halting 29 inbound and 17 outbound ships. “Our assets are out there right now, still assessing the situation, still trying to come up with a game plan,” Reno said. “We would love to get some traffic moving.” Crews have deployed 3,800 feet of boom around the barges to contain the spill. More than 12,000 feet of additional boom is being deployed to protect sensitive areas around the bay, the Coast Guard said. There have been no reported impacts to wildlife. Beuerman said the barge company estimates about 9,000 barrels have spilled. He said once crews determine how to salvage the damaged barge and flip the capsized one, the Coast Guard will be able to estimate when the ship channel can reopen. An online vessel registry lists the Genesis River as a Panama-flagged vessel built in 2018 that most recently made a port call in Houston on Friday. It was bound for Port Said, Egypt on May 29. Many shipping firms register vessels in Panama, as the Central American company has less onerous fees and regulations than other countries. All foreign-flagged vessels are required to use a pilot to navigate the Houston Ship Channel. Houston Pilots spokesman Henry de la Garza said a pilot was aboard the Genesis River but declined to comment on the collision, citing the ongoing investigation. Kirby Inland Marine operates about one-quarter of the 4,000 barges in the United States and has a heavy presence in the ship channel. A Kirby-owned barge collided with another barge near the mouth of the channel in 2014, igniting a fire. Several months earlier, a tanker and bulk carrier collided overnight off Morgan’s Point, near the site of Friday’s collision. That crash forced the closure of the ship channel and dumped aroud 88,000 gallons of fuel into the waterway. zach.despart@chron.com www.twitter.com/zachdespart<doc-sep>
(CNN) — Ship and barge traffic is resuming in the Houston Ship Channel as cleanup efforts continue in the aftermath of a spill that sent thousands of barrels of gasoline blending product into the channel, officials said Sunday. The spill came after a collision in the channel Friday between a 755-foot oil tanker and a tug pushing two barges. The impact capsized one barge, damaged the other and triggered the leak of gasoline blending stock that the barges were carrying, the US Coast Guard said. The barges – pushed by the towing vessel Voyager – were loaded with the gasoline blending component reformate, which leaked into the water after the collision near Bayport, Texas, officials said. About 9,000 barrels of reformate spilled into the channel, according to incident commander Jim Guidry, an executive with Kirby Inland Marine, owner and operator of the Voyager. There were no reported injuries during the collision with the tanker, the Genesis River. An estimated 25,000 barrels of gasoline blend stock were loaded on each barge, a Coast Guard statement said. Here is an estimate of where the gasoline-like odor from the barge collision may reach overnight (Midnight to 6 am). The stronger order will be mainly east of I-45 from near Webster to Bayport. pic.twitter.com/iElSvH0LDj — NWS Houston (@NWSHouston) May 11, 2019 Federal, state and local agencies are involved in the cleanup and environmental monitoring. A statement from those agencies Sunday said that the damaged barges have been secured and efforts were underway to remove cargo from the barges. “Work is expected to continue throughout the day with an established priority of ensuring the protection of (Galveston) Bay from the additional release of product,” the statement said. Officials at a news conference Sunday said some 2,700 air monitoring samples from the area had been taken and none of them exceeded “established action levels,” meaning they don’t pose a health risk at this point. Water quality testing is being done along the bay, the statement said. CNN’s Hollie Silverman, Ray Sanchez and Shawn Nottingham contributed to this report.