More than 2,000 people in Indiana were ordered to evacuate their homes on Tuesday after a fire broke out at an industrial site in Richmond that had been used to store vast quantities of “unknown types” of plastic, officials said.
Reported sometime after 2 p.m. local time, the fire had belched colossal plumes of black smoke into the sky by the time firefighters were able to contain it several hours later. Still, a state fire marshal on the scene said, the blaze was “going to burn for a few days.” On Tuesday night, there was no timeline for how long it would take to extinguish the fire completely.
The marshal, Stephen Jones, noted that the evacuation zone, which impacts approximately 2,011 people in Wayne County, could shift as the winds change. “The smoke is definitely toxic,” Jones said, according to local station WXIN. “We don’t want the residents in the smoke.”
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The industrial site, which spans roughly 175,000 square feet, was once a Hoffco factory but has been used since its closure in 2009 to store plastics and other materials for recycling, Mayor David Snow told the Associated Press.
“They were under a city order to clean up and remediate that site,” Snow said. “We knew that was a fire hazard the way they were storing materials.”
Fire officials echoed Snow’s words, with Richmond Fire Chief Tim Brown saying that the owner of the building had previously been warned several times, and had at one point been hit with an “unsafe citation” about stacking plastic on the site.
“It is very frustrating for all of us,” Brown said. “The battalion chief on today was very frustrated when he pulled up because we knew it wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when this was going to happen.”
In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday, Snow called the matter a “worst-case scenario.”
“This is something we never wanted to see happen,” the mayor added. He tweeted late Tuesday that the evacuation order was expected to remain in place overnight.
The site lies about 70 miles east of Indianapolis, and just over four miles from Ohio’s western border. Residents in multiple nearby Ohio countries reported seeing smoke in the sky on Tuesday, the Dayton Daily News reported.
No serious injuries were reported, but officials said a firefighter had injured his ankle after tumbling into a ravine while battling the blaze. He was treated and released.
Snow said that state and federal regulators were on the scene to assess the fire’s impact on air quality and surface water runoff. A spokesperson for Wayne County Emergency Management told Western Wayne News that officials believed there would be no impact on the quality of the town’s drinking water.
The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.
