Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Mont Belvieu, TX

Mont Belvieu sits on top of the Barbers Hill salt dome in northwestern Chambers County, about 32 miles east of Houston along State Highway 146.

The first permanent settler at Mont Belvieu was Amos Barber, who built the first home on the hill in 1849, and the community was long known as Barbers Hill.

Mont Belvieu got its post office in 1890, and as late as 1920 the town had an estimated population of only twenty people.

Commercial oil production began at the Barbers Hill oilfield in 1918, transforming Mont Belvieu from a farming settlement into an oil and petrochemical town.

Mont Belvieu is recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy as the largest underground storage area in the world for natural gas liquids, with caverns carved into its salt dome.

Mont Belvieu has been the center of the natural gas liquids industry since the 1950s, and by 2018 Enterprise Products alone maintained nearly 130 million barrels of storage capacity there.

A 1985 explosion at a plant on the salt dome led petrochemical companies to buy out some 200 families, and the town of Mont Belvieu was rebuilt about two miles east of its original site.

Mont Belvieu's population has surged with the energy industry, rising from 2,324 in 2000 to 3,835 in 2010 and 7,654 in the 2020 census.

Mont Belvieu stretches across the Chambers County line into Liberty County, and local students attend the Barbers Hill Independent School District, whose schools were relocated to the rebuilt townsite on Eagle Drive.

Mont Belvieu had incorporated by 1970, when it counted 1,144 residents, after decades as an unincorporated oilfield community.