station. a lot of people were injured in that part of this sort of evacuation. in all, 23 people were taken to the hospital. 19 people were taken to hospitals, four more were walk-ins. many of the injuries were minor. the police say a lot of them were flashburns. and this is what we know about this device so far. this is according to two u.s. intelligence officials briefed on this incident. they say, basically it consisted of a five-gallon bucket with a lid on top placed inside a plastic grocery bag, not clear what kind of substance was used to cause this explosion or fire. they say it did not actually explode. it just flashed creating flames. they are still looking into whether or not it was designed to explode or be some sort of chemical device causing injury by chemical fire or flames. again, at this point, according
that officials have told us for most of this week they expect that incidents like this to occur and they just posted a statement moments ago saying that the redundant refrigeration systems that cooled those toxic peroxide chemicals that they knew those systems had failed and this was all heating up inside as a result of massive flooding inside. they had about 40 inches of water. but they just posted a statement saying as agreed with public officials, the best course of action is to let this fire burn itself out and they said we ll likely see additional incidents. so you ll see more fires like this at the chemical plant there in crosby, texas. they had evacuated a 1.5 mile zone around that plant. anyone who lived within that perimeter was taken out about two or three days ago, anderson. they also had an 11-person team that was there when the hurricane hit friday night. they were there through the
don t cut fema funding. fema is life line to american people in these natural disasters. we always want fema quicker but the other life line to the working poor, who don t have insurance and can t afford insurance and who live inside of a flood zone. by no fault of their own. no, please, we need to raise the available money for fema. as well as with the epa. we don t have an epa region six director supervising this chemical fire because they haven t been appointed yet. so there are key people missing in fema. those slots need to be filled and filled now. so hopefully the president will make that happen and the congress will help him. well general, we appreciate all of your efforts, keeping up informed of what is happening and what they need most because a lot of people are coming to the table to try to make those
the military efforts in katrina 12 years ago. when you see a fire like this, it raises concerns but it tells a story of what happens in a disaster like this, where there s all these ripple effects and sometimes you can t predict at the outset and a lot of people don t think about it, whether it s beaumont last night running out of drinking water or now this chemical fire. that s why they re disasters. you lose control of what s happening. in this particular case, anderson, the company is the main spokesman, opposed to the epa who we pay a lot of money to control this, which is region six out of dallas. they should have a representative there, an incident commander, supervisor. yet we got a french company public affairs officer informing the people of texas what s happening. don t worry about it, be happy. i get concerned when there s a
weekend and they basically became aware of the fact that this plant was heavily flooded and the cooling systems for those organic peroxide chemicals were going to fail. and they did fail. this is what was expected. the company is treating this as if, look, we all expected this. there are going to be more incidents like this. we re just going to let it burn out. brian, just to be clear, i know the area has been evacuated, but people seeing this, they hear chemicals and fire, are going to be concerned about the effects of that stuff in the air. reporter: absolutely. what is interesting is a couple of days ago, they sent some local deputies to the scene to check things out and make sure people were out of there. some of the deputies were treated for smoke inhalation, but they did determine the smoke they inhaled was not toxic. so they were treated and released. but you see images like this and