Good morning. I'm Laurie Christensen with
Harris County Fire Marshall's office.
To give you a very short brief,
we'll be back in about 30 minutes
with Harris County Pollution Control
and Harris County Public Health.
But Chief Mcateer from ESD 48 and I did
want to give you just a quick brief,
and we want to thank you for waiting.
Chief, you want to start?
Yes, Sir, we we received an an
alarm at about 8:42 last evening
for a leak in a warehouse and on
arrival we we saw an active leak
from an overhead refrigeration line.
There was some maintenance work being
done on the refrigeration system and so.
So the league could not be stopped.
Yeah. So we pull the cruise out.
Yeah, the the product is the
refrigerant is anhydrous ammonia.
There's a potential for 24 pounds,
£24,000 in the system.
There may not be that much actually
involved in in this section of pipe.
The the leak is it is inaccessible
right now you really can't be repaired.
So at the time it was,
it was contained to the building
and so we started air monitoring.
Because the incident progressed,
we needed to call in our
subject matter expert partners,
so we called Harris County
Hazardous Materials.
And and they continued the air
monitoring with the more remote meters.
And let me turn it back over
to the fire Marshall.
Thank you, chief. What?
What you see here is Chief Mcateer
is the incident commander.
You see we have a unified command group.
In addition to ESD 48, we have Texas DPS,
Harris County Sheriff's Department,
Houston Fire Department,
Precinct 5, Constables Office,
community Fire department,
Harris County Mutual Aid 11,
Harris County pollution control,
Harris County public health and tech dot.
What I'll tell you is that Harris County
Hazmat was dispatched shortly after the.
Incident occurred,
the line itself is about 16 feet in the air.
So when Chief was talking
about it being inaccessible,
it's because of how high it is
and that is an explosive product.
So at the time our HAZMAT team
could not go in there and do
anything about that initially.
But what I'll tell you,
the leak was contained to the
building and around 1:00 AM they
started to see that it was leaving
the building immediately air
monitoring had started on the outside.
Even more.
And that's why we called in
Houston Hazmat and also Harris
County Pollution Control.
I will tell you that this is an
ongoing incident and again we're going
to come back in about 30 minutes
with Harris County Pollution Control
and Harris County Public Health.
We want to give you some numbers,
but I do also want you to know that
because Harris County ESD 48 had
performed their pre plans and you
know they're very familiar with the location,
Harris County inspections team had
done an inspection on the property.
So we're we're confident that we
are familiar with the property
and again in about 30 minutes.
We have Harris County pollution Control
and Harris County public health here.
We'll have some additional information,
but I do want to thank you all and
just know that we have a significant
amount of folks out here and that
we are ensuring the safety of the
responders and the public at this time.
Thank you.
If you don't mind, could I come
back with public health and
pollution control and and apologize?
It's only because I I know I see
him pulling up, and I want to make
sure we get the briefing and get
you all the information at once.
But I want to thank you all for waiting.
We don't that's why I'm waiting
on as soon as they get here.
Yes, Sir. And and again I keep in
mind I've got individuals on site,
but we we need to have those directors
here speaking because we want to
give you accurate information and
the most valuable information for
you to give to your listeners.
So thank you.
Um, so this this particular
facility is located,
it's called the $0.99 warehouse,
the 23600 block of Colonial Parkway.
It's an 800,000 square
foot building. Thank you.