Hell in my Very Own Neighborhood, aka HOLY CRAP!

OK, I'm short on blogging time but I had to mention this. About ten minutes till 6 pm I'm sitting at my computer in my PJ's, the cat's in the window and Sparky was in his room watching Dan Rather and the whole house just shook. Really horrible sound, we thought a tree had fallen on the house. The weather was damp out and my first guess was it must have been a hell of a thunder clap (we've been getting a lof of window rattling storms lately... it's the end of the world, you know). I run to the back door to look and Sparky runs out front, Phoebe runs out of the window and looks at me with her "What the hell was that?" look.

It's almost dark outside, but half a dozen of our neighbors are out on their front porches also, looking around in panic. Nothing to see, though, that's reassuring. But I hear helicopters circling, something happened. My parents live like 6 blocks from us so I give them a call, but they don't pick up (it's dinner time). Then just as if it was scheduled, all the local news channels start their 6:00 news with images of flames shooting through the air, and a big mushroom cloud fireball that the traffic copters apparently caught as it happened. Holy crap... Some sort of chemical plant has blown up and is the whole thing is already engulfed in flames in just a few minutes. And it's on the next major street over from our house, but it's dark and all I can tell is it's somewhere off of Fondren and South Main. Don't know it it's north of south, I can't picture that area but I'm guessing it's north (on my side) because I remember there being some industrial areas near the hundreds of apartments and 70's tract homes in that neighborhood. Not to sound snotty, but we rarely go down Fondren because it's a really crowded area with too many people, and it's one of the more dangerous areas adjacent to us (way too many people walking and just "hanging out". Oh good, it is on MY side of the street, and it's about a mile away from my house and even closer to my parents house.

A few minutes into the news my dad calls back, yes they were eating, and yes they heard something, but they assumed it was thunder. By this time I'm flipping through channels, Sparky is flipping in his room, and I land on ABC and get see a caption of "the voice of an eyewitness" who's on the phone, and... it's my ex-boyfriend. Oh yeah, that's right, he lives in that neighborhood, he'd be out of the house like a shot for a gigantic explosion (and serving doughnuts to the firemen... long story, see 300 things). So I shout out to my dad "OMG, it's KP on channel 13!" And my dad starts talking about him, and I'm trying to pay attention, so I don't get to hear much of what he said about the fire other than that he lived right across the street literally.

It's raining now, which is apparently a good thing, even though it's some sort of horrid petrochemical plastic wax stuff that's burning (oh goodie, burning plastic, one of my least favorite smells). We can see the huge black cloud from our back yard. It's cool outside, but we turned the heater off. The local news covered the fire non-stop for two solid hours, more small explosions, the whole place is just burning like crazy. Apparently no one was killed, which is fricking amazing, but all of the apartments, churches and stores adjacent to it had their windows all blown out, and people were flying off of furniture. Not good. People are on the phone telling the news people that they heard it all the way across town, even outside of the city, camn...

There was more coverage on the 10 pm news after that, more eyewitnesses and neighbors. It had burned down some, but is expected to burn through the night. So it's kind of cold in the house here at 6 am, and I'm so stopped up I can't breathe, but I think we'll keep the air off for at least a few more hours. I'm guessing the poor fire department is still out there throwing water on it what's left of the fire 12 hours later. Should be interesting to see what the mess looks like in the daylight.

So when you see the giant fireball over and over on CNN today, that's my neighborhood in Houston.

Posted by Morticia at December 04, 2004 05:53 AM