Source: https://www.chron.com, April 2, 2019
By: Julian Gill and Jasper Scherer
One person has died and two people were injured  in a fire Tuesday morning  at KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, authorities said.

A shelter in place has been ordered for all residents within a 1-mile radius of the plant at 16503 Ramsey Road.
All campuses in Crosby ISD, Channelview ISD, Galena Park ISD  and Sheldon ISD are also under a shelter in place. Crosby ISD has turned off their HVAC systems and it will not release students to parents or let them onto school buses until further notice.
Officials from the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office and the county’s Pollution Control Services Department were headed to the scene, according to a tweet from the Harris County Office of Emergency Management.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality also dispatched officials from its Houston office to assess the scene, the agency tweeted.
That office was continuing to monitor the ITC site at Deer Park, but is also “actively monitoring” the Crosby explosion, the tweet said.
KMCO has activated its incident command center and dispatched its emergency response team to help first responders extinguish the fire, president and CEO John C. Foley said in a statement.
“We are deeply saddened to confirm at this time that there have been injuries and one fatality,” Foley said. “Those injured have been transported for medical treatment. Our hearts and prayers go out to the individuals involved, as well as our first responders, employees, and our community.”
Corey Prantil, 31, felt his house shake at about 10:55 Tuesday morning.
From his location about two and a half miles northeast of the KMCO plant, the ground shook, his windows rattled and it sounded like someone was trying to break in through the front door.
“I thought ‘Oh Jesus,’ went outside and drove down the road to the plant,” Prantil said. “I got down there saw where lab was, and the plant was on fire.”
Prantil said he had not been contacted by any local authorities to shelter-in-place but knew the local schools were shutting off their HVAC systems and keeping students inside as a precaution.
He watched smoke fill the sky from his back porch about an hour after the blast, looking to see whether the wind was pushing the black smoke closer to his house. It was.
The conflagration reminded him of what happened at the Arkema plant during Hurricane Harvey, when several of their tanks caught fire after the site was flooded by torrential rains. As a state trooper who responded to that blaze, he was troubled by that company’s refusal to answer basic questions about the chemicals they had on hand and how much fluid was leaking into nearby floodwaters and neighborhoods.
Prantil said the Arkema incident, coupled with the nearly week-long fire at an Intercontinental Terminals Company plant in Deer Park in late March, should prompt local officials to take more action to police Houston-area chemical facilities.
“It seems like Houston is the capital of plants blowing up recently,” Prantil said. “I think Harris County needs to step up on enforcement. a whole lot doesn’t get said by these companies, and I don’t think that’s right.”
Ernest Roder lives across Clara Wilson Road from the plant. Roder, 71, was working with his son on a tractor in his metal farm building when they felt a concussion.
“My first thought was a sonic boom,” Roder said as he waited out the commotion in his house.
“But it was too loud. My son thought something dropped in the shop. When we walked outside we saw the smoke and knew exactly what it was.”
Roder, who has lived on the street for nearly 50 years, said he wasn’t alarmed by the fire, figuring if he needed to evacuate someone would tell him.
“It never has bothered me,” Roder said of the plant. “Unless it gets worse we’ll just wait it out inside the house.”
The fire comes almost three weeks after a tank farm at a petrochemical holding facility in Deer Park also caught fire. Investigators have yet to get to determine a cause for the blaze at Intercontinental Terminals Inc., where 11 of the tanks caught fire, sending up a plume of smoke and stoking concerns about air quality in the area.