Official: Smoke poses no danger

A large cloud of smoke
continued to rise from the site Tuesday.

CHAMPION — The director of the Trumbull County Emergency Management Agency said that it appears the smoke from a warehouse fire isn’t dangerous, but that neighbors living nearby should stay out of it until air-quality testing clears the area of any danger.

A fire and explosions occurred Monday around 5 p.m. The site continued to burn and emit smoke throughout the day Tuesday, said Linda Beil, EMA director, who was at the site late Tuesday afternoon. Throughout the day, parts of the warehouse caught fire again in several places, she said.

Beil said officials from the Trumbull County Haz-Mat team and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency monitored the fire Tuesday.

The consensus among the investigators at the scene was that most of the hazardous chemicals coming from the warehouse were sent into the atmosphere just after the fire began and that the remaining smoke was not dangerous to neighbors, Beil said.

However, she said she hoped that U.S. EPA officials expected later Tuesday would provide a definitive answer to the question, she said.

Though 18 area fire departments responded to the fire, officials decided to allow the fire to burn itself out rather than extinguish it, and that could take additional days, Beil said.

Beil said a lot of smoke was still rising from the warehouse late Tuesday. The smoldering metal structure is no longer standing, she noted.

The fire occurred at a warehouse owned by InterGroup International Ltd. The company has said its business involves reprocessing of scrap plastic. A Champion firefighter said the building contained plastic and a large amount of cardboard.

No workers were inside the building at the time, and no injuries were reported. A spokesman who came to the entrance to InterGroup driveway Tuesday morning said employees were reporting for work as usual because there are two other buildings at the location not affected by the fire.

Beil said the fire apparently started inside the warehouse. Explosions heard at about that same time apparently came from large propane tanks outside of the warehouse and probably occurred after the fire started, she said.

runyan@vindy.com