Smoke-belching Texas chemical fire out
HOUSTON — Crews on Wednesday extinguished a fire that burned for days at a Houston-area petrochemicals storage facility and began cleaning up the site.
Intercontinental Terminals Co. spokesman Alice Richardson said at a news conference that the cleanup will allow workers to reach the site and begin the investigation into what caused the blaze.
Crews will continue spraying foam and water on tanks that caught fire to cool them down and prevent the blaze from reigniting, Richardson said. The tanks contained components of gasoline and materials used in nail polish remover, glues and paint thinner.
The fire in Deer Park was extinguished at 3 a.m. Wednesday. It began Sunday at the facility southeast of Houston, sending a huge, dark plume of smoke thousands of feet in the air.
Just hours after firefighting crews extinguished the blaze, the company said some of the tanks at its Deer Park, complex that escaped the flames probably suffered heat damage and might be demolished. The cause of the conflagration hasn’t been determined; the site is still too hot for investigators to access.
“With the amount of heat that was exposed to those tanks, we’ll have to take all of those most likely out of service, might have to inspect them, potentially have to demolish them and probably start over,” David Wascome, Intercontinental Terminals Co.’s senior vice president of operations, told reporters Wednesday.
Company officials earlier had said that eight tanks caught fire while seven others in the same section of the storage facility did not.
Adam Adams, an official with the Environmental Protection Agency, said testing shows the air quality remains safe and that it hadn’t detected hazardous levels of pollutants such as volatile organic compounds near the site. Officials said Tuesday that the smoke was reaching at least 4,000 feet up and staying high enough so that the air quality at ground level was safe.
Officials warned residents not to touch any debris or dust that may have fallen from the plume.
International Terminals hasn’t yet tallied up the dollar value of the losses it incurred in the fire.
“Of course [Intercontinental Terminals] is very sorry,” Richardson said during a news conference Tuesday. “This isn’t an event we wanted.”