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By Alex Horton and Mark Berman
CROSBY, Tex. — The remnants of Hurricane Harvey carried its wrath up the Mississippi Delta on Thursday, but not before hammering the Gulf Coast with more punishing cloudbursts and growing threats that included reports of “pops” and “chemical reactions” at a crippled chemical plant and the collapse of the drinking water system in a Texas city.
The plant’s operators, which had earlier Thursday reported explosions, later said they believe at least one valve “popped” there, though they noted it was impossible to know for sure since all employees had left the site.
“EPA has emergency response personnel on the scene and the agency is currently reviewing data received from an aircraft that surveyed the scene early this morning,” Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said in a statement. “This information indicates that there are no concentrations of concern for toxic materials reported at this time.”
Sounds like we may have been lucky so far.
“We were notified by the Harris County Emergency Operations Center of two explosions and black smoke coming from the” plant, the company, Arkema, said in its initial statement.
Other accounts soon followed. The Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office reported “a series of chemical reactions” and “intermittent smoke” at the facility; a county official said there weren’t “massive explosions,” and instead referred to the reactions as “pops” followed by fire.
William “Brock” Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had called the potential for a chemical plume “incredibly dangerous” at a briefing Thursday morning.
Climate change insures that we will be grappling with an increasing number of ‘unpresidented’ extreme weather events. Unprecedented changes we can hardly anticipate, and are woefully unprepared for.