The Salt Lake City-based chemicals conglomerate suspended operations at eight of its Texas Gulf Coast petrochemical plants on Thursday but held off ordering the Lake Charles shutdown until it became clearer where the monstrous hurricane would come ashore.

"You don't want to shut anything down if you don't have to," Huntsman spokesman Don Olsen said. "But now that it appears the storm will make landfall a little further east than originally anticipated, it looks like Lake Charles will be under a more direct threat."

As of late Friday, the Category 3 hurricane was on a track that could spare Houston and Galveston a direct hit. Instead, the storm was expected to plow directly into the oil and chemical centers near Port Arthur and Port Neches, communities approximately 75 miles east of Houston.

Four of Huntsman's eight shuttered Texas plants are in the Port Arthur area while the remaining facilities in Conroe, Freeport, Chocolate Bayou and Dayton are closer to Houston. The Lake Charles plant is approximately 25 miles due east of Port Arthur.

"Our first priority always has been the safety of our employees, the communities and our plants," Olsen said. "We have had evacuation plans in place for all of our major facilities and they have carried it out. What we're uncertain of is the impact the hurricane will have on our plants."

About 2,000 employees work at the nine facilities that now have been closed, Olsen said. The Port Arthur area plants are empty of employees. The plants in the Houston area are being staffed by skeleton crews who will try to keep storm damage at those facilities to a minimum.

Along with being a major center for oil refining, the Texas Gulf Coast also is a major petrochemicals production center.

"This storm is threatening facilities that produce about 50 percent of the nation's petrochemicals," said Sharon Dey, spokeswoman for the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association in Washington, D.C.

Yet unlike the oil refining industry that often maintains large stockpiles of inventory at its plants, petrochemical producers rarely carry large amounts of their product in storage, Dey said.

And that means the chance of a storm-caused petrochemical spill is remote.

"What little storage we have at our plants are in hardened tanks," Olsen said, noting that Huntsman's facilities are "pipeline based." Almost as soon as the plants produce product it is shipped out to customers over the nearby pipelines that serve the plants.

If Hurricane Rita severely damages petrochemical production along the Texas Gulf Coast it eventually could lead to higher prices for any number of consumer products.

Huntsman's plants, for example, produce petrochemicals used in consumer products ranging from gasoline to toothpaste and laundry detergent. The titanium dioxide produced at Lake Charles is used as pigment to whiten paints and plastics.