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Hundreds of homes near Houston still under evacuation orders as pipeline fire burns for second day

In a statement Monday night, the city said it “appears to be an isolated incident” but officials have not provided details on how they came to that conclusion. Photo via Getty Images

A pipeline fire that erupted in a suburban Houston neighborhood burned throughout a second day and into the night Tuesday with still no definitive word on when the blaze would finally go out, when nearby residents may be able to return home or why a car drove through a fence and hit a valve before the destructive explosion.

Although the fire was getting smaller, the disruptions caused by the Monday morning explosion in a grassy corridor between a Walmart and a residential neighborhood left some locals increasingly weary. On Tuesday, people could be seen returning to their homes to get clothes and other items before quickly leaving again.

“We literally walked out with the clothes on our backs, the pets, and just left the neighborhood with no idea where we were going,” Kristina Reff said. “That was frustrating.”

Over 36 hours after the blast — which shot towering flames like a blowtorch above the suburbs of Deer Park and La Porte — authorities have provided few details about the circumstances leading up to the explosion.

Investigators said it happened after the driver of a sport utility vehicle went through a fence near the Walmart and struck an above-ground valve. As of Tuesday evening, authorities had not still not identified the driver or said what happened to them.

Deer Park officials have said police and FBI agents found no preliminary evidence to suggest the explosion of the pipeline, which carried natural gas liquids, was a coordinated or terrorist attack. In a statement Monday night, the city said it “appears to be an isolated incident” but officials have not provided details on how they came to that conclusion.

The car was incinerated by the explosion, which scorched the ground across a wide radius, severed power transmission lines, melted playground equipment and ignited some homes.

The valve, which appears to have been protected by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, is located within a long grassy field where high-voltage power lines run. Several pipelines run underground.

Authorities evacuated nearly 1,000 homes at one point and ordered people in nearby schools to shelter in place. By Tuesday afternoon that number was down to just over 400.

“The fire is still burning, but the good news is that the pressure within the pipeline is continuously dropping, which means we are getting closer to the fire going out,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement.

Operators shut off the flow after the explosion, but Hidalgo has said that 20 miles (32 kilometers) of pipeline stretched between the two closed valves and the chemicals inside had to burn off before the fire would stop.

Robert Hall, a senior advisor at the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust, said it’s not surprising that it’s taken more than a day for the material to stop burning.

“You’re talking about 20-inch pipelines and miles between valves, so it takes a long time to burn down,” Hall said.

On Tuesday, the Texas Railroad Commission that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry said its inspectors only will enter the site after it is deemed safe by emergency authorities.

Houston is the nation’s petrochemical heartland and is home to a cluster of refineries and plants and thousands of miles of pipelines. Explosions and fires are a familiar sight, and some have been deadly, raising recurring questions about industry efforts to protect the public and the environment.

Hall, who previously oversaw pipeline and hazardous materials investigations for the National Transportation Safety Board, said there are few regulations that govern the location of pipelines near homes and businesses.

“That becomes a very local issue, community by community,” Hall said, adding that some jurisdictions require bollards — sturdy pipes filled with concrete — to prevent vehicles from crashing into sensitive infrastructure.

Hidalgo said Tuesday that Energy Transfer, the Dallas-based owner of the pipeline, has said it was working to isolate parts of the pipeline closest to the fire by clamping it on each side.

Energy Transfer did not immediately respond to a question about what safety precautions were in place near the valve.

Hall said regulations from 2022 aimed at reducing deaths and environmental damage from ruptures were geared toward gas lines, not those carrying liquids, and would not have applied to this pipeline. He added that many new safety regulations that have been put in place do not apply retroactively to pre-existing pipelines.

Both Energy Transfer and Harris County Pollution Control were conducting air monitoring in the area and have found no health issues, according to Deer Park officials.

Since leaving home, Reff and her family have been staying in a hotel room paid for by Energy Transfer. But they were eager to return.

“It would be nice to be in our own beds,” she said.

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A View From HETI

Researchers from Rice University say their recent findings could revolutionize power grids, making energy transmission more efficient. Image via Getty Images.

A new study from researchers at Rice University, published in Nature Communications, could lead to future advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use.

The study revealed that electrons in strange metals, which exhibit unusual resistance to electricity and behave strangely at low temperatures, become more entangled at a specific tipping point, shedding new light on these materials.

A team led by Rice’s Qimiao Si, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy, used quantum Fisher information (QFI), a concept from quantum metrology, to measure how electron interactions evolve under extreme conditions. The research team also included Rice’s Yuan Fang, Yiming Wang, Mounica Mahankali and Lei Chen along with Haoyu Hu of the Donostia International Physics Center and Silke Paschen of the Vienna University of Technology. Their work showed that the quantum phenomenon of electron entanglement peaks at a quantum critical point, which is the transition between two states of matter.

“Our findings reveal that strange metals exhibit a unique entanglement pattern, which offers a new lens to understand their exotic behavior,” Si said in a news release. “By leveraging quantum information theory, we are uncovering deep quantum correlations that were previously inaccessible.”

The researchers examined a theoretical framework known as the Kondo lattice, which explains how magnetic moments interact with surrounding electrons. At a critical transition point, these interactions intensify to the extent that the quasiparticles—key to understanding electrical behavior—disappear. Using QFI, the team traced this loss of quasiparticles to the growing entanglement of electron spins, which peaks precisely at the quantum critical point.

In terms of future use, the materials share a close connection with high-temperature superconductors, which have the potential to transmit electricity without energy loss, according to the researchers. By unblocking their properties, researchers believe this could revolutionize power grids and make energy transmission more efficient.

The team also found that quantum information tools can be applied to other “exotic materials” and quantum technologies.

“By integrating quantum information science with condensed matter physics, we are pivoting in a new direction in materials research,” Si said in the release.

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