Crosby plant blast kills worker, injures 2 others

CROSBY — A massive explosion at a chemical plant in northeast Harris County on Tuesday killed one person and sent two others to the hospital in critical condition, sparking a blaze that sent yet another plume of dark smoke into the sky and forcing residents to temporarily shelter in place.

The fire, ignited by a flammable gas called isobutylene at the KMCO chemical processing plant in Crosby, marked the third time in 17 days that asmoggy cloud of smoke emanated from a Houston-area chemical facility.

It is the first chemical fatality at a Houston-area plant since 2016, when a worker died in an incident at PeroxyChem in Pasadena. In 2014, four workers died at a DuPont plant in La Porte.

Responders extinguished the KMCO fire late Tuesday afternoon, while on-scene investigators with the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office began conducting interviews to determine where the fire started and what caused the gas to ignite.

“There’s a lot of hot metal in there,” said Rachel Moreno, a fire marshal spokeswoman. “Until it’s safe for our guys to go in, they’ll continue doing interviews of everybody that was at work.”

The response will stretch Harris County’s resources, Moreno said, as the fire marshal’s office begins its second major investigation in less than three weeks. The site of an even larger conflagration at Intercontinental Terminals Co. in Deer Park less than 15 miles away on March 17 remains too unsafe for investigators to visit.

KMCO President John C. Foley apologized to the Crosby community during a news conference for the disruption and alarm the fire caused.

“It is with great sadness I stand before you today mourning the loss of a cherished member of our KMCO family,” Foley said. “Our hearts go out to them and our loved ones. … Our number one priority is safety and compliance.”

He declined to provide further information, including the identities of the employees killed or injured in the explosion.

KMCO, a subsidiary of an Austin private investment firm, produces coolant and brake fluid products for the automotive industry, as well as chemicals for the oil field industry. Its facility, which has a history of environmental and workplace safety issues, sits about 13 miles away from the ITC plant, where Harris County officials continued to detect carcinogenic benzene this week.

The KMCO plant is less than three miles from the Arkema facility where aseries of explosions spewed chemicals and sickened residents after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

26-agency response

At the KMCO plant, responders from multiple agencies had yet to determine the full inventory of chemicals on site, though Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters Tuesday afternoon that he was concerned about “other fluids or chemicals” in the complex.

KMCO spokeswoman Pilar Davis said the fire initially began when isobutylene caught fire, which spread to a warehouse containing ethanol and ethyl acetylene, which are used in the production of fuel additives.

Davis said the company has disclosed the site’s chemical inventory to investigators, but declined to immediately share it with the Houston Chronicle.

The explosion, which occurred shortly before 11 a.m., reminded residents of the recent flare-up at ITC, though the ensuing fire and smog did not match the intensity of the prior smoke plume, which blanketed the Houston area for several days.

Still, the incident prompted a swift 26-agency response led by the fire marshal’s office. Officials ordered a shelter-in-place for all residents within a one-mile radius of the plant, and several nearby school districts followed suit.

Personnel at the Harris County Office of Emergency Management, already activated because of the ITC fire, turned their attention to the Crosby blaze.

“It is disturbing and it is problematic that we are seeing this incident at a facility, especially on the heels of ITC,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said at a news conference.

Crosby ISD also turned off its heating, ventilation and air conditioning, while Houston ISD canceled outdoor activities at 53 schools in the north and east portions of the district.

The county and school districts lifted their shelter-in-place orders as the afternoon wore on. Sheriff ’s deputies enforced a perimeter around the plant as tanker trucks continued to haul water to the site, and crews used bulldozers to pour earth into drainage ditches to prevent runoff of the firefighting foam, which can contain hazardous chemicals, into nearby waterways.

As responders worked to contain the fire, the Environmental Protection Agency, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Harris County Pollution Control monitored air quality nearby for detectable chemicals. Shortly before 4 p.m. Tuesday, officials had yet to detect chemicals that required action, according to the EPA.

‘It shook the whole house’

Some employees working at the plant narrowly escaped danger. Contractors Brian Balcerowicz and Cesar Mendoza felt the blast from an explosion-proof control room located feet from harm’s way, Balcerowicz said.

Someone told the two contractors “there had been a problem” and ordered them to remain in the control room, Balcerowicz said. The explosion came about five minutes later.

Nearby, residents felt their homes rattle from the force of the explosion. Brandy Lyons, who lives less than a quarter-mile from the plant, at first thought someone’s car had slammed into her house. Nearby, Tawanna Johnson was feeding her 1-year-old son when she heard a “big boom” that shook her home on Rownita Street.

She called 911 after looking outside and seeing smoke rising from the plant and paper-size debris lofting into the air.

“It shook the whole house, windows. It felt like something dropped on the house,” Johnson said. “We haven’t had anything like this since Arkema. It was scary but further away.”

Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Hendry said he felt like he had been struck by another vehicle when the explosion hit, rattling the windows of his patrol car.

“My neighbor called me and told me that their pictures were knocked off the wall,” said Hen-dry, who was the first to call in about the incident. “There were about five or six more explosions (after). I know the explosion was central, so it was inside of a cluster of tanks. Ido know that the fire team was on scene pretty quickly.”

Mark Ragsdale said the explosion nearly knocked him out of bed. After spotting the plume, he went outside to investigate further. As a former firefighter, he recognized the smell as burning plastic and noticed there was no wind to carry the black smoke elsewhere.

“I went to the fence, like an idiot, to talk to my neighbor and started coughing,” Ragsdale said.

Several residents said they detected an unusual scent in the air. Ragsdale’s eyes began burning and his throat later became scratchy, he said. Lyons said the air left “a weird taste in your month.”

“It smells pretty bad,” she said as acrid smoke wafted into her backyard hours after the fire started.

In response, the Environmental Defense Fund called on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to inspect “every single facility every single year.”

“Texas is failing to protect people from chemical fires and explosions and rogue releases of toxic air pollution,” EDF senior director Elena Craft said in a statement. “It is untenable.”

Petition filed

KMCO’s facility is not currently compliant with the federal Clean Water Act, and it has had dozens of OSHA violations since 2010. A runaway reaction there sent three employees to the hospital on Christmas Eve that year.

The blaze Tuesday was the third chemical fire in the Houston area in 17 days. The day before the ITC fire ignited, a fire at a motor gasoline unit in the ExxonMobil plant in Baytown burned for several hours.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office filed a petition late Tuesday in court seeking an injunction against KMCO for violations of the Texas Clean Air Act. Paxton’s office filed a similar petition against ITC after the fire there.

Dug Begley, Jacob Carpenter,

Matt Dempsey, Julian Gill, Nicole

Hensley, Nguyen Le, Marissa Luck and Shelby Webb contributed to this report. jasper.scherer@chron.com zach.despart @chron.com