Fire snuffed — but not fears
Officials still don’t know what chemicals were inside warehouse
Yolanda Rios woke up the morning after the fire with a pounding headache.
She pulled out a mask she normally wears to scrub the bathroom and gave it to her 12-year-old son, David Melendez, as he prepared to leave for school.
Rios, 51, lives just a few homes away from a warehouse that caught fire Thursday and sent black, acrid plumes of smoke into the air, leaving a fine ash on much of her Spring Branch neighborhood. On Friday morning, as she took David to school, firefighters battled spot fires. Nearby, dead fish floated in a bayou stained blood-red by the fire runoff.
“They need to do a very hard cleaning,” Rios said.
So far, she said, authorities have been unable to answer some of her most pressing questions, particularly what chemicals people near the fire may have been exposed to.
There have been no reported injuries, caused by inhalation or otherwise, said Jay Evans, a Houston Fire Department spokesman.
The fire started behind
a house on Laverne Street and spread to Custom Packaging and Filling Company on Spring Branch Drive. A company manager told investigators that the warehouse contained barrels of petroleum-based additives and pesticides, fire officials said.
Fire officials on Friday, however, said they still did not know what chemicals burned or washed into Spring Branch Creek, which feeds into Buffalo Bayou.
Michael Walters, a spokesman for the Houston’s Office of Emergency Management, said much of the company’s paperwork burned in the fire, which made it hard for them to know what chemicals were there.
An environmental remediation company was trying to suck up the petroleum additive floating on top of the water, and dilute what remains.
Brian McGovern, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said Friday that a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency contractor was conducting air monitoring. The results were not yet available, officials said.
Public records identified the president of Custom Packaging and Filling Company as Thomas B. Jones. Jones’ home phone number was disconnected.
The company served industrial customers and handled various hazardous substances, according to its website and TCEQ records.
It has no record of environmental violations with TCEQ and has not been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the past five years, records show.
Fear of potential harm from the hazardous chemicals prompted the evacuation on Thursday of about 650 children and 80 staffers from nearby Spring Branch Elementary School, said Spring Branch ISD Police Chief Chuck Brawner.
“Being in Houston, we have all kinds of things around our school,” Brawner said. “But it all ends up with parents being reunited with their kids.”
Adrian Shelley, the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, called the warehouse fire “the consequence of accepting the kind of industry in our city that we accept.”
“If you have enough chemical warehouses in your city,” he said, “you’re going to occasionally have these very bad incidents.”