involved two other chemicals. if i remember correctly, sorry, i m blanking right now essentially, two other chemicals that weren t organic peroxides. i assume if a fire/explosion happens, the tanks might rupture. they listed with the epa, literally, it lists out the worst case scenario was considering perfect meteorological conditions. we re far past the perfect meteorological conditions at this point. there is a lot of concern. a quick point, too, i heard from a number of experts who wondered why temperature was their only way to keep this organic peroxide safe. at least two experts that i talked to said they should have had it would have been standard operating procedure for a facility like this to have some sort of compound to quellch the organic peroxide,
essentially make it the explosion risk, the fire risk was not there. it would eliminate that stock so they wouldn t have it for product going forward. i don t know why they didn t do that, i haven t gotten a good answer from arkema about that at this point. maybe they weren t following procedure according to the experts. but i find it troubling that they said they planned for a worst case scenario. and the storm just ripped right through that. matt dempsey, data reporter at the houston chronicle. i followed your work for a long time. you always do very good work. right now you re doing work that is very, very scary to hear about, even from this distance. thank you for helping us understand it. i appreciate it. thank you for having us on. the last point that mr. dempsey was making there, other people who store this stuff have a fail-safe. this is a chemical that will explode, or at least burst into flames if it s allowed to rise in temperature. but there s a way that you can
conference call with reporters to answer questions about the situation at the plant. we tried to reach the company today hoping the ceo could join us tonight to help us explain and understand what s going on there. we left several messages with him. but we never heard back. i m not complaining, it s understandable. but he did make this public call. today the ceo said arkema has removed all its staff from that plant and the area around it. he said there is now, quote, no way to prevent a possible explosion there. because they can t get back into that plant. they can t do anything to start cooling off those chemicals again until conditions relent. one reporter on this call today, matt dempsey, of the hughes chronicle, he standard what seems like a pretty straightforward question in a crisis like this. i mean, given that people have been evacuated from a mile and a half around this plant, given that they said there s no way we can prevent an explosion, that they can t keep these chemicals
isn t one, but we just don t know about it. this is the purported place that we ve seen, and others have seen, where the special counsel is doing that. josh, do you know, were you able to uncover how long this teamwork has been happening? how long these two teams have been working on this together? and do we know which side initiated this? we don t know which side initiated it. in our reporting today, it happened over the summer. we know there were subpoenas issued by attorney general schneiderman in this case, this summer. and we also know the special counsel was impaneled this summer. my sources told me today the cooperation has been ongoing for at least a month. so my sense is that probably mid, late summer, could have been early summer. but about two or three months or so. josh, one last question for you. the way this fits into my understanding of what s going on with the mueller inquiry is paul
because whatever those communications were during the campaign between this russian bank and the trump organization, it s still unexplained all these months later. the cleanup, nothing to see here effort by these lawyers who alfa bank hired, it hasn t worked. it has not been a credible cleanup effort. these guys do have a way of landing on their feetey way. now one of the lawyers who alfa bank hired to do the cleanup work, to oversee one of these so-called investigations of the whole trump tower server thing, the one that didn t even look at anything in 2016, one of those lawyers is a man named brent benchcowski. and he is who the trump administration has now nominated to lead the criminal division of the u.s. department of justice. criminal division of the u.s. department of justice is a big deal. robert mueller, the special counsel on the trump-russia investigation, is the former head of the fbi.