police that several people are dead as a result of this collapse. but it is not even clear they ve reached everybody just yet. nbc s mia rodriguez is live in miami. mia, what do you know about this? reporter: ali, we just go to the scene. you could see right behind me, this is the bridge collapse right here. right over there you could see it sort of bent down on to southwest eighth street. right now we are standing in the city of sweet water. this construction site is an area that they are building student housing. that was the impetuous for building this particular bridge in order to get students from this side of southwest eighth street to the main campus which is on the other side. this is a huge university. more than 50,000 students, it is a public university here in miami. joining me right now is jose mejia living here in the city of sweetwater which is where we are standing. you were out here having lunch and i ll remove this so you could hear. what did you hear and what did
112th avenue, from chopper 6 from our chopper, for our helicopter i could see about fo four cars but that is from the aerial aerial images. by the time i arrived, i believe the vehicles were covered with yellow tarp so i couldn t even make out the make or model of the vehicle. all i could see was again a large police presence and i could see the bridge that that was that was collapsed. mia, what we re just going word from rick scott, the governor, he s on his way and tweeting he s on the way to florida international to be briefed by local law enforcement and university officials. laura, what is your sense of the activity around there? are they have you seen more rescue workers coming in? what are they able to do because latest we ve seen is that some are on their stomach and reaching in and trying to figure things out. there is a crane on-site but i would imagine it is too early for them to be lifting anything out of position? yes.
or so sort of this swinging into place. there were a lot of dignitaries out here, people from local municipalities and districts that were sort of applauding this bridge had finally been built again after so many years of trying to get something like this done out here for the students and the faculty that go to florida international university. mia. we ll stay close as you learn more about this. of course we are trying to get as much information as we can, we do hear from police that several people have died but we don t have a up to date number. but we are looking at live images and there are cars that remain trapped underneath. this is on eighth street, this is while the pedestrians were not on top of the bridge. there were vehicles underneath it. so we re trying to get a count and a update on that. michael como with the engineering firm cme associates. he s familiar with the type of bridge construction that was used here. it is something called accelerated bridge construction.
let s go to mia rodriguez where a chemical plant caught fire earlier this morning. there is a lot of concerns about this plant. what sort of chemicals are in there, if the fumes are foxic. t toxic. the plant said they are noxious. and this is a serious situation. officials say they re keeping a very close eye on it. eight containers have organic p peroxides in them. the particular compounds are very volatile. they can catch fire, they re flammable. this direction, this is as close as we can get.
region. 11 trillion more could follow. 30,000 people have been forced into shelters. 3500 people have been rescued. 12,000 national guard members have been activated by governor abbott. and outside help continues to pour in. teams from all over the country. including florida utah and california are in texas right now to help stranded residents. let s go to mia rodriguez in houston. you re near the attics reservoir. that s 17 miles from downtown houston. engineers have been releasing water from that reservoir. it hasn t been enough. you can see a lot of that walter has creeped into this area. look at this situation we have