We learned some things from this.
The Intercontinental Terminals Co. fire that broke out March 17, 2019, did not just lead to a massive black plume of smoke lingering for days over east Harris County, before spreading 20 miles to downtown Houston and other parts of the city.
It also led to Harris County officials rethinking their emergency notification systems, after hearing from deeply concerned residents who said they hadn’t received timely information about what was happening at the chemical plant near their homes.
Five years later, they have results to show for their efforts, but staying informed during an incident can still be a complicated challenge for residents.
The fire at the ITC Deer Park facility was the first test for the new Harris County Commissioners Court. County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, who represents east Harris County, had taken office less than three months earlier, flipping the court to a Democratic majority. They were quickly thrust into the complexities of a chemical fire – a not uncommon occurrence in east Harris County, where the economy is anchored by an expansive petrochemical industry.
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Kristen Lee, the senior director of legislative affairs in Garcia’s office, experienced the incident as both a resident living near the facility and a newly-hired member of the Precinct 2 team. On the Sunday morning of the fire, her first notification about the incident came first hand when she saw the smoke on her way to church.
“The size of the plume, I just felt very uneasy,” Lee said.
As the day unfolded, there were signs that the fire was serious. But Lee also recognized there were many reasons why she wasn’t getting information as quickly as she wanted.
There’s nothing simple or straightforward about emergency communications during a chemical incident, she said. East Harris County is made up of numerous cities – including La Porte, Deer Park and Pasadena – each with their own emergency management team and communication system. Plus, getting the information right doesn’t happen immediately.
“It’s very hard to do,” she said, “to calculate risk in those first hours of an event.”
Ultimately, local officials must rely on cooperation from industry leaders in order to have information to share. Sometimes government officials are fighting for the same details as the public, trying to get answers from private companies that treat the information as proprietary.
Despite these challenges, strengthening public alerts during these incidents has been a major priority in the years since the ITC fire, she said.
“It’s like teaching industry how to communicate from scratch,” Lee said, “because the old way of doing things where they tighten up and don’t let any information out just isn’t going to work anymore.”
See here, here, and here for some background, and here for an initial assessment of the problem. There sure were a lot of big industrial fires in the county around that time, and being able to communicate with the various agencies involved and the general public, which wanted to know as much as it could as quickly as possible, was a real challenge. There are still issues to work through, but a lot of progress has been made.