"Climate change is making the risk of disastrous chemical accidents more likely. But the EPA wants to gut recently enhanced safety requirements for hazardous facilities."
"Raschelle Grandison had just walked out her front door to grab something from her car on a chilly March morning in 2019 when she stopped dead in her tracks.
Grandison stared in disbelief at what looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud approaching the Houston home she shared with her mother, who ran outside to see what was wrong. They were still watching the giant black cloud hurtling toward their neighborhood from the Houston Ship Channel when the shelter-in-place alerts started blaring.
“It was just terrifying because when you shelter in place, you’ve got a cloud over you, you can’t leave, you can’t go anywhere and nobody can come in,” Grandison said. “It’s just you and God at that point.”
A massive fire had started at a bulk-liquid storage facility run by the Intercontinental Terminals Co. about 5 miles away after a faulty pump released naphtha, a highly flammable hydrocarbon used to make gasoline and plastic, from an 80,000-barrel tank."
