Good luck & clean living mean everything

They won't say it publicly because it would be, well, unseemly.

But the captains of Dow Chemical Co. are as happy as a puppy with two peters that Hurricane Rita finally headed up the Texas coast to Port Arthur, home of the Janis Joplin Museum but, thank God, a stretch of the Texas Chemical Coast where the company has no manufacturing sites.

How much does Dow have invested in Texas? About a third of its holdings. That's a lot -- about 13 billion samoleans, give or take a few shekels. Its manufacturing plants in Texas are in Freeport (5,000 employees), Garland, Texas City, Seadrift, and Deer Park/La Porte. Dow has a business center in Houston.

Even so, Katrina and now Rita aren't good for bidness.

Dow and other companies already have announced across-the-board price increases as oil and gas production in the Gulf takes a nosedive.


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