News

A fire and explosion rocked a chemical processing facility northeast of Houston on Tuesday, a little more than two weeks after another fire at a tank farm alongside the Houston Ship Channel sent a massive plume of black smoke over the nation's fourth-largest city for days. 

One person died at KMCO LLC's site and two more were flown via helicopter to hospitals on Tuesday after a transfer line ignited in the area of a tank containing isobutylene, a flammable liquid gas, that caught fire, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said. An adjacent warehouse containing dry chemicals also caught fire, he said. 
Neither Gonzalez nor other law enforcement and emergency management officials knew what the dry chemicals in the burning warehouse were when they spoke to reporters early Tuesday afternoon other than identifying them as "dry combustibles." Officials said they were awaiting a list of those chemicals from KMCO LLC.