“I was filling out the paper work inside, and my eyes were running and running with tears,” Mercy Reyna said. “It was just that desperation of wanting to get your eyes out and just rub them and rinse them and put them back. It’s just that burning sensation.”
The latest blaze erupted just hours after a wall holding back almost a million gallons of toxic, flammable liquids collapsed, and just two days after the original conflagration was suppressed. Intercontinental, a unit of Japan’s Mitsui & Co., said three tanks and a drainage ditch were alight before firefighters suppressed the flames after more than an hour.
Wall Repairs
One of the tanks involved in the new blaze contained xylene, a toxic byproduct of the oil-refining process, while the other two held gasoline components.
The breach in the containment wall had been plugged as of Saturday morning but efforts to drain toxic fluids still held in one of the damaged tanks are on hold until the wall can be fortified, according to ITC.
Although the company said Friday that there were about 60,000 barrels (2.52 million gallons) of hazardous chemicals still held in the damaged section of its complex, by Saturday morning it no longer knew how much remained. Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing ITC of violating clean-air laws.
“There’s more tanks in there. Is it going to reignite? It’s very uncertain,” Reyna said. “The trust is not there. We feel like we’re not being told the truth of what’s going on.”
People at nearby industrial sites and a state war memorial had already been warned to take cover when the key containment wall failed, prompting the U.S. Coast Guard to shut part of the Houston Ship Channel, which abuts ITC’s complex. The channel is one of the busiest commercial shipping facilities in North America, connecting Houston’s manufacturing and oil-refining nexus to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It remained closed on Saturday.