2 more chemical containers explode at Crosby chemical plant

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Authorities have evacuated residents within a mile and a half of the facility and said the fumes from the fire don’t pose an immediate public threat. The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting air and water tests in the area.

Arkema is a maker of organic peroxides commonly used by the plastics and rubber industries. They must be kept in cool temperatures or they can explode. The Arkema plant lost power earlier this week, knocking out the primary supply and backup generators and forcing employees to move the organic peroxides into nine box vans with cooling systems, which soon began to fail.

The company has abandoned the facility and any hope of preventing the chemicals from catching fire. Rennard said the company believes any fires from the containers won’t spread to the plant itself.

Despite the explosions and noxious fumes, Arkema has refused to provide a chemical inventory and facility map to the public. Speaking to reporters Friday morning, Arkema CEO Richard Rowe said the company was balancing “the public’s right to know and the public’s right to be secure.”

That answer wasn’t good enough for Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas.

“There’s no good reason they shouldn’t be putting this information out,” he said. “It makes it look like they’re hiding something.”

There’s little patience or sympathy for Arkema from Crosby residents near the plant.

Philip Mincey had evacuated from his home about a quarter of a mile from Arkema because of floodwaters. He bought the place a year ago. There’s enough land that he and his girlfriend can raise four cows, a cat and 30 to 40 chickens. Now, Mincey can’t get back to their property. He’s worried about their animals, and he’s tired of the lack of communication from Arkema about when he will get temporary housing. He doesn’t know when he can return home, and he wonders about the dangers of the inevitable explosions from the plant.

“At first, I was understanding; it was an accident,” Mincey said. “But now, they’re jerking us around.”

Late Thursday night, the company provided a list of the chemicals on the site. But the potential hazards they pose remain unclear because the company did not provide the amounts of the chemicals, where those chemicals were located, or in what types of containers the chemicals were stored.

Melissa Wren, a company spokeswoman, said Arkema was advised by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to refer all requests for the detailed chemical inventory, called a Tier Two, to the state agency.

“She’s mistaken,” said Andrea Morrow, spokeswoman for TCEQ. “(The agency) has told Arkema they are free to release the Tier Two if they so choose.”

Morrow said if someone requests the Tier Two from TCEQ, it will have to be through a formal public information request and it would be sent to the Texas Attorney General’s Office. That office, under Greg Abbott and now Ken Paxton, has blocked inventories from the public citing a state law that restricts information that might be useful to terrorists.

The Texas Homeland Security Act, passed in 2003, made government information confidential if it could be used to plot terror attacks. For more than a decade, the law was never invoked to block release of chemical inventories. The state reversed course after widespread media interest in the data following the 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas.

PUBLIC ACCESS DENIED: Arkema backtracks on promise to provide chemical inventory

Arkema has responded to some questions about what led to the emergency. Daryl Roberts, a company safety official, said neutralizing the organic peroxide with another chemical was not practical and that “at no point” did they intend to destroy it.

The company initially considered relocating the chemicals but deemed that process too risky, Roberts said.

“For us to be in a position where we were going to put that material into trailers and try to move it, it runs the risk of not being able to get it out of the area or getting it stuck in traffic, or having a fire or an explosion at a highway or at a public area, versus in the rural area where this site is,” he said.

Roberts confirmed two chemicals contained on its government mandated worst-case scenario report — sulfur dioxide and isobutylene. They were located hundreds of yards from the organic peroxides exploding on the site, he said.

“There’s no issues with any of those materials,” Roberts said. “No fire or water damage. No degradation in any of the systems that you’re asking about.”

The company left the material on site with backup generators and a cooling system, but the company didn’t say whether the generators were elevated.

“Those were our levels of contingency,” Roberts said. “Clearly, that wasn’t enough.”

Company officials have said they expected the refrigeration to fail in all the trailers and that additional explosions are inevitable for the six remaining containers.

The six containers that remain but located in a more remote location of the plant, said Arkema officials. Bob Royall, assistant chief of the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office, said he believed they could explode in a matter of days as temperatures continue to rise.

“Wish I had a crystal ball,” he said.

CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN: In November 2014, four workers died at a DuPont plant in La Porte after being exposed to a toxic gas. Responding emergency workers weren’t sure what was in the air. The surrounding community wasn’t, either. A Houston Chronicle investigation dives deep into Houston’s hidden world of explosions and toxic releases and probes the regulatory failures that put us in jeopardy. Click here to read our series.