The blaze in Deer Park, about 20 miles east of Houston, began Sunday morning when a storage tank caught fire at the Intercontinental Terminals Company’s facility there, the city said. The city issued a shelter-in-place order that afternoon but lifted it by the next morning after officials received word that air quality readings had not “exceeded action levels.”
Several fire departments fought the blaze throughout the week to prevent it from spreading and extinguished it by early Wednesday, officials said. Throughout Wednesday, local and federal officials had assured the public that air-quality readings were “well below hazardous levels” and that there “was no potential threat” posed by elevated levels of benzene in the air.
Benzene, which is a natural part of crude oil and gasoline, is a colorless, flammable liquid with a sweet odor that is known to cause cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
Early Thursday, officials issued another shelter-in-place order around 5 a.m. after what they said was a benzene leak at the storage facility where the fire occurred. The Deer Park Fire Department posted a statement from Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County, who said that air quality readings in the area had crossed “our very conservative” standards and that officials were again telling residents to take shelter “out of an abundance of caution.”
“We know this is concerning, especially to residents in the area of the shelter in place,” the judge’s statement said. “We are continuing to monitor to verify if this is a short-term, onetime exposure or a longer exposure. At the level of benzene we are seeing now for the current duration it should not cause symptoms even in the area impacted.”
At a news conference later Thursday, Hidalgo said that benzene vapor had been discovered early Thursday but that only the area around the storage facility seemed to show elevated levels of it. Low winds had kept the vapor mostly in that area, she said.
“We are in fact starting to see a downward trend in some of our samples,” Hidalgo said.
Still, some residents expressed skepticism about officials’ assessments after having been told for days that the air was safe to breathe.
“Everything has been wrapped up in this nice perfect bow in saying that there were no problems,” Terri Garcia, a longtime Deer Park resident, told The Associated Press. “Every air quality was perfect. Every wind was perfect blowing it away. And if everything was so perfect, why did it happen?”
At the news conference, Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of Harris County Public Health, acknowledged that the low level of risk presented by the air quality and the order to shelter indoors might create some cognitive dissonance for residents. The amounts of benzene that have been detected, he said, “are still not high enough” to warrant “the level of concern that people may be having” as a result of being told to shelter in place. But he still implored residents to heed officials’ warnings.
Teams of hazardous material and chemical experts and the Texas National Guard have been deployed to the area, Hidalgo said. Various streets and highways were closed because of the shelter-in-place order and the local school district canceled classes. The nearby city of Galena Park has also ordered residents to stay indoors as a precaution.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.