APEX, N.C.-
As many as 17,000 residents were asked to evacuate early Friday as firefighters waited for daylight to battle a hazardous materials fire that shot flames some 150 feet into the sky.
Hospital officials said 18 people were sent to emergency rooms after the blaze that began late Thursday in this suburban Raleigh town.
Town manager Bruce Radford said he did not know what ignited the flames. “This is truly awful,” he said. “It is the worst potential hazardous materials fire that you can expect.”
Hours after asking almost half the town’s resident to evacuate, officials ordered additional evacuations for several hundred more homes when a plume of smoke and chemicals moved.
Radford said firefighters had to wait for daybreak to examine the blaze at Environmental Quality Co., a hazardous waste business that housed a variety of volatile chemicals, including chlorine.
Even then, he said, the best option might be to simply wait for the fire to burn itself out.
A yellow haze lingered over downtown and there was a faint smell of chlorine in the air. Police lined up along the main street that runs through the town’s business district, blocking both ends of the road. Officials said Apex’s downtown and schools would be closed Friday.
“People are going to want to come in and sight-see at this fire scene,” Radford said. “They will either get terribly sick or they will be arrested. No questions asked.”
Of the 18 people hospitalized, eight were law enforcement officers and one is a firefighter who complained of nausea and respiratory problems.
Nine other residents were being treated for “respiratory distress,” said WakeMed spokeswoman Heather Monackey.
And About 100 elderly residents were evacuated from a nursing home in Apex and were sheltered in nearby hospitals.
Radford said the fire started around 10 p.m. Thursday. He said when he arrived at the scene, a chlorine cloud rose 50 feet in the air and flames shot three times as high. He estimated there were 20 to 30 explosions inside the plant.
The fire jumped the chemical plant site and appeared to have burned four petroleum tanks belonging to another company, Weatherly said. That likely accounted for some of the explosions that were heard, he said.
“They don’t know whether they even want to put water on the fire at this point,” said Sharon Brown, a spokesman at the Wake County Emergency Management Center. “At this point they’re still monitoring the chemicals, and they don’t know what the best way to mitigate the fire is.”
Robert Doyle, an Environmental Quality spokesman at the company’s headquarters outside Detroit, said an emergency response team was being mobilized to help with the clean up. He said about 25 employees work at the Apex plant and all had left the building by 7 p.m.
Doyle said the facility handles a wide array of industrial waste–ranging from paints to solvents.
“Because of the many different types of waste that we bring in, it’s very difficult to determine the cause of the fire,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Mike Baker and Martha Waggoner contributed to this report from Raleigh.
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