Fort Worth warehouse fire fueled by hand sanitizer continues to burn a week later
FORT WORTH, Texas - A fire that's been burning at a Fort Worth warehouse for a week continues to burn.
Inside that warehouse are countless bottles of hand sanitizer.
Not only does it tie up fire department resources, but it also has people who live nearby concerned about the air they're breathing.
The fire broke out on October 6. Now, a week into the battle, fire officials said what was a warehouse filled with bottles of hand sanitizer is still smoldering.
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"We have had crews on the scene around the clock since the initial incident happened, monitoring the situation," said Craig Trojecek, with the Fort Worth Police Department.
A third phase of fighting the stubborn chemical fire has just begun.
"We’re going to break up the big piles into smaller piles, and we can go in and extinguish those smaller piles," Trojecek explained.
The environmental impact is being closely monitored and has even shown up through social media.
A Tik Tok video created from a drone shows bottles of hand sanitizer that made their way to an inlet of the Trinity River near the warehouse.
A time-lapse version showed a man cleaning it up and putting the sanitizer in garbage bags.
"A lot of storm drain and stuff that eventually went out into the Trinity River," Trojecek added.
City officials said the narrative, in some instances, has been taken out of context.
"I think it’s important to say that nobody was dumping this stuff into the Trinity," Trojecek said.
Trojecek points out that firefighters in the first two days alone used five million gallons of water to beat back the flames. He said that water pushed the bottles of sanitizer through the open storm drains.
"Everything we’ve been told on our end is that there is no health risks, no issues to be worried about," he added.
City, state, and regional environment agencies are monitoring the matter for all safety-related concerns.
"On our end, we knew with our partners trying to monitor everything, that there was no known issues from an environmental impact," Trojecek said. "Whether it be from air quality or from water quality. From everything we are being told, we weren’t concerned about that aspect of it on our end. We were looking at it from the how quickly can we get this thing mitigated to where folks can get back to business and we can have this situation completed."
No timeframe has been given on when the flames will finally be put out.
The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation.