of the town and killed 15 people, texas made one change to its rules about chemical storage. what those chemicals were and where they were stored would no longer be public information. which means when things start exploding, like they are right now at the arkema plant, the people of texas are asked to trust the companies and state officials are telling them the truth about what s happening. and what the danger is. now if you lived near this arkema plant, would you trust the state officials and the same state officials whose only response to a previous chemical explosion was to hide information from the public about what chemicals are spewing into the air. fortunately, there are people who are trying to get that information, trying to fact check the authorities. last night rachel spoke with chronicle reporter who wrote a series of articles last year about the dangers of texas s chemical plants.
smoke from these peroxides is similar to standing over burning campfi campfire. we believe the smoke is a nontoxic irritant. the fire marshal s office plan from the beginning was to allow for the fire to burn itself out. firefighters are taking a defensive posture to prevent it from spreading. next we ll hear from assistant chief roy chief roil from the harris county fire mar charlottes office and then officials from arkema will provide a statement as well. thank you, sheriff. my name is bob royal, royall. the harris county hazmat team is part of my command. a statement i d like to share with you is that earlier this week at approximately 2:00 a.m. on tuesday morning the county eoc, which was in full operation at level one, received a call for a water rescue at the arkema
currently closed because it s inside the 1.5-mile evacuation radius. sheriffs vehicles blocking anyone getting on or off it. getting around as if getting around wasn t difficult enough, now this major highway is closed. as you are discussing, there s a lot of conflicting information right now beginning last night when there were two reports of explosions at this arkema plant. today we wake up to hear county officials and an executive from the chemical plant saying it wasn t an explosion. it was a chemical reaction. basically what s happening, the arkema executive said they have nine containers of organic compounds that are highly flammable. they anticipated harvey hitting their property so they closed shop. they brought in backup generators and those failed. then they brought in another system and that failed. right now one of the nine containers basically combusted, caused a fire and released with their calling irritants into the air. we are trying to determine just
thank you for your time today. i know it s a busy time there as this evacuation unfolds and congratulations at least what we ve seen so far and hope it continues to go as smooth as we have been watching it play out here so far. appreciate your time. again, as we continue to cover this story you see an evac twlags. a flooded chemical plant catches fire sending black smoke shooting into the sky back in the houston area triggering new fare. cnn s nick valencia is in the arkema plant near crosby texas. reporter: in may sound lik c semantics, they say what happened in crosby texas at plant, they lost the ability to cool the vessels containing this organic peroxide, highly combustible. because it wasn t being cooled you saw what happened early this morning, 3:00 a.m. local, large plumes of smoke.
when it could be a potential problem? of the materials are required to be kept cold, as far as i know, i don t know that there is any chemical way of keeping that from happening. i spoke with two experts yesterday, they both said that it is standing operating procedure at facilities like this to have a compound to neutralize them. why did arkema not have that? i cannot answer that, i do not know the chemistry that you are describing. when they started to happen we started taking measures to shut down the plant, it was shut down, and we put in place multiple layers of detection to try to provide a refrigeration for the materials that needed to be kept in the storage.