Official: Three dead in chemical plant explosion
JACKSONVILLE, Florida (CNN) — Three workers are dead and five are injured after an explosion Wednesday at a chemical plant sent a thick plume of smoke over a section of Jacksonville, according to the city’s fire department spokesman.
Literally, it’s a hellish inferno. There is no other way to describe it, Tom Francis told reporters.
The Duval County Medical Examiner’s Office said it had not received any reports of deaths.
Officials ordered an evacuation of nearby business. By 4 p.m. ET, the order had been lifted after tests of the air found no toxicity, Francis said. See a report about the blast
Firefighters were still battling hotspots, and the effort will be going on for quite some time, he said.
Six patients have been transported to Shands Hospital in Jacksonville, hospital spokeswoman Kelly Crockmeier said. In all, 14 people have been taken to hospitals, Francis said.
A Shands official said the hospital incident command system had been activated — something done only to put the staff in high alert in anticipation of trauma patients.
The blast occurred at the T2 Lab on Faye Road in an industrial area on the waterfront in north Jacksonville. See a map of the site of the explosion
A woman who answered the lab’s 24-hour facility emergency phone said the plant manufactures ecotane, a gasoline additive that reduces tailpipe emissions, according to the laboratory’s Web site.
Police have cordoned off the area near Faye Road, closed off highway exits to the site and set about evacuating office workers from the city’s industrial section, said WTLV-TV reporter Grayson Kamm. At least 15 fire trucks were at the scene.
A spokesman for JEA, a Jacksonville power company, said it has a power generating plant across the street and was evacuating all nonessential employees from the building.
The billowing black smoke could be seen from the city’s downtown district, said Florida Times-Union reporter Bridget Murphy. Murphy said she talked to several workers as they walked out of the area, who were shaken to the core.
They described a hissing noise and then a sound wave, she told CNN.
Murphy has reported that sources tell her that two people are dead.
Antonio Padrigan was trying to get in touch with his son who works in a plant in the area but was having no luck reaching him on his cell phone.
He was shook up when he called me, but I can’t get through to him anymore, Padrigan said. I don’t know if he’s in the hospital or what.
CNN I-Reporters Jonathan Payne and his son Calvin shot pictures of the explosion. They felt the blast shake their home, which is about 15 minutes away, and went to see what was going on because they thought there had been a plane crash.
Calvin, 16, shot photos from the car, and Jonathan stepped outside to shoot photos that turned out clearer.
Carlton Higginbotham, 63, was working at home on Townsend Boulevard in Jacksonville when a loud boom shook his house, he said.
It was a gunshot-type explosion; it wasn’t a rumble, he said.
The insurance salesman and his neighbor ran outside and noticed thick smoke billowing from the other side of the St. Johns River, which separates his neighborhood from the site of the blast.
The cloud that came out of it was white, some would say mushroom-shaped, Higginbotham said. It was followed by dark, dark smoke.
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