An explosion, fear: Just another Texas chemical blast
BOOM. It was a head-to-toe jolt at 1 a.m. that woke my friends and I. We were in Groves when a processing unit exploded in the neighboring town of Port Neches and caused multiple fires at the local TPC chemical plant.
The boom was so powerful that it caused windows to shatter, doors to blow in and ceilings to collapse in the houses near the refinery located at Highway 366 and Park Street.
One of those Port Neches houses is my childhood home. Less than a mile from the explosion stands a house on Avenue D built by my grandfather in the 1940s, when he moved to Port Neches from Laredo for a lifetime job working at Texaco.
My mother grew up in that home with her nine siblings before she raised me and my two sisters there. Currently, my 79year-old aunt Bea and her grandchildren live in the family home.
At 6:23 a.m., I messaged my cousin Ashton: “Are you OK?”
“The house looks like we had a small earthquake at home,” he replied a half-hour later. “A broken window or two, some insulation from the ceiling in the kitchen, lots of random things broken or knocked over.
My bed was covered in glass from the window when we left.”
All fixable things. No one hurt. A couple missing cats, but one had already been spotted in the neighborhood.
You would be hard-pressed to find a single family in this part of Southeast Texas who don’t have at least one tie to the petrochemical industry or a refinery.
It’s why our grandfathers came here, and it’s why so many of us decide to stay here.
The money made by process operators, engineers, construction workers, contractors and the firewatch fuels the entire economy.
It flows from the refineries to the workers to the Market Basket grocery and the Neches Brewing Company.
So when you grow up here, you get used to these middle-ofthe-night booms.
You clean up the debris, file a claim with your insurance provider and the company that caused the damage, and you cross your fingers that you’ll get reimbursed at some point.
Flares in the sky: typical. A putrid, rotten-eggs smell at the corner of Rubber Plant Road and Pure Atlantic Road: easily forgettable.
But a black plume of smoke with unidentified chemicals or carcinogens being blown into neighboring communities the day before Thanksgiving? That’s not just another day in our company town.
By noon, the fires were still burning. I heard from my cousin-in-law that her husband, my cousin CJ, was working the fire. He’s a Groves firefighter, continuing a legacy set by my Uncle John, a longtime Port Neches firefighter.
CJ has a daughter named Dilynn who just turned 4 on Nov. 9.
“Pray for CJ. He is working,” Brandy messaged with a prayer hands emoji.
So I did.
Julie Garcia is a features reporter focusing on health, fitness and outdoors.