Apex residents are settling back in after a chemical fire forced them out of their homes late Thursday night.
A fire broke out around 9 p.m. at the EQ Industrial Building, a licensed hazardous-waste facility, on Investment Boulevard in downtown Apex. It prompted city officials to declare a state of emergency and evacuate almost half of the population between Thursday night and Friday morning.
Mayor Keith Weatherly said in a press conference Friday afternoon there was no way of knowing exactly how many people evacuated. However, if everyone in the affected area, borded by U.S. 55, U.S. 1 and N.C. 64, had evacuated, it would have been around 16,000.
City officials allowed residents back in to some neighborhoods as early as 8 a.m. Saturday. At a press conference that morning, Apex Fire Chief Mark Haraway said the fires had been succesfully extinguised, but there were still “hot spots” and the fire department was keeping a watchful eye on the remains of the building.
“We have a long and arduous process going on right now,” he said. “We’re going to have fire units on the scene for several days working closely with the clean-up crew.”
Aditi Subramanian, freshman in biomedical engineering, and Melissa Scott, freshman in textiles and apparel management, call Apex home.
“Both our families heard the explosion,” Subramanian said. “They thought it was thunder.”
City officials established shelters in local elementary schools for displaced families, and those shelters were later consolidated at Green Hope High School in Cary. While thousands evacuated from the area, Weatherly said the numbers housed in shelters were in the hundreds.
David Stratton with Wake County Human Services was the shelter manager at Green Hope High. He said people were moved from the other two shelters because those schools were not capable of handling the food and shower requirements of evacuees.
Another reason Green Hope High was chosen, according to Stratton, was because it was out of harm’s way, and had the capacity to handle larger numbers in case the evacuation did become long-term.
According to Weatherly, the building that caught fire was a temporary storage site for hazardous waste.
“I understand that fertilizer was stored in this vicinity, some organic oxides, definitely pesticides,” he said.
However, officials are still unsure as to what specific chemicals the fire released into the atmosphere. Weatherly said the Environmental Protection Agency had been on site doing analysis but wasn’t able to obtain any definite conclusions.
At the press conference Saturday morning, Haraway said an investigative team was going in around 8 a.m. to determine the origin of the fire. However, he said it would still be a while before any specifics would be known.
“It could be several days to weeks before we can really identify all that,” he said.
While Weatherly said EQ had no history of issues with the municipality of Apex, EQ has been fined in the past for failing to maintain proper procedure in the handling of its waste.
According to the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the Division of Waste Management fined the company $32,000 in March 2006 for several violations, including failure to “maintain and operate the facility to minimize the possibility of a sudden or non-sudden release of hazardous waste” and failure to “immediately carry out the provisions of the contingency plan whenever there is a release of hazardous waste,” among others.
Scott Maris, vice president of EQ, told reporters during a Friday evening press conference that there was no connection between the fire and the fines.
“We don’t believe there is any relation between the two events,” he said.
The chemical-management company EnviroChem Environmental Services, listed by the Division of Waste Management with the same address and EPA identification number, was fined $131,000 for other violations in February of 2001 like failure to “include correct information on inspection records” and failure to “maintain adequate access to a fire extinguisher.”
Matt Moore contributed to this report.
