protected to the best we can. this morning, as expected, were all of the research that was done by myself and others, we found out that we had one of the vans of that there was a chemical decomposition a chemical reaction that resulted in a fire at that location, there were a number of small containers inside that s it did a rupture. we heard some popping noise coming from that area, then gray smoke, followed by fire. excuse me. it is my understanding that three this is 1 of 3 of the containers that they had lost refrigeration on. and so we can expect a similar type of decomposition in those other trailers, maybe even all nine of them before it is over with.
accessing the facility, and we believe at this point is that the safest thing to do is to allow the other eight containers, the products and those to degrade and burn. excuse me, just a few more remarks, and then i will be happy to take some questions, certainly, on behalf of all of the employees at arkema, i want to apologize for the income that this is having on the local community, we certainly appreciate all of the work that the responders are doing to help protect the safety of those in the area, and that is our primary objective, and we re going to continue to do that. i am happy to take some questions. maybe one at a time. so our understanding is that the materials stored in these containers there are pressure relief valves on these containers, when pressure builds up in the container, to a
generators to provide back-up power to provide refrigeration to those products. as the floodwaters rose, those generators were compromised and we lost the use of those generators because of the floods waters. we actually had a third system in place, which was liquid nitrogen. we have a liquid nitrogen system on sight to provide refrigeration to the storage containers. because of the flooding, floodwaters, some of the equipment necessary to operate it was also compromised. the fourth layer of protection was the refrigerated storage containers. we brought the refrigerated storage containers and moved the product into these containers, which is where they are now. explosions or popping or whatever you want to call it? yes, we are anticipating the eight remaining containers that have not had product degrade in
know this chemistry, that know the products. we had the equipment, we felt like, based on what we would have anticipated happening in the storm. we certainly didn t want to bring these out on to the roads with hundreds of thousands of people being evacuated and having a trailer stuck on a highway somewhere with numerous people around. we felt the safest place to keep the containers and protect the citizens in the area was to keep the product on site. are you willing to rae lease a list of all the chemicals? we can share the information about what other chemicals we have on site. what are the health risks? what we have is a fire. talk into the microphones. i m trying to speak to the individual asking the question. sorry. nobody can hear you if you don t speak in the microphone. the question is, what is the health risk?
interstate 90 totally close, there was panic surrounding the chemical plants around 1:00 a.m. last night, officials now saying that harris county fire marshals are saying that s there are series of containers that have an organic compound in them that were being released, and that created the pop, 15 harris county deputies were harmed, they are being treated right now and are expected to be okay, harris county sheriff describes what happened. there were different organic peroxides of different grades that were released, and it created a pop in the containers where they were being stored, and some gray smoke initially emanated from it, eventually turned into black smoke it, we did have a deputy out in that perimeter, and so it is not