A fire that burned for four days after Texas pipeline explosion has finally gone out, officials say

DEER PARK, Texas (AP) — A fire that burned for four days after a pipeline explosion in the Houston suburbs burned out Thursday after the once-towering blaze had put hundreds of nearby homes under evacuation orders, city officials said.

Investigators say the fire began after the driver of an SUV went through a fence alongside a Walmart parking lot and struck an above-ground valve. On Thursday, human remains were found inside the vehicle and authorities had opened a criminal investigation, according to the City of Deer Park.

Officials in Deer Park, where the explosion happened Monday, described the crash as an accident, and said police and local FBI agents have not found evidence of a coordinated or terrorist attack.

Human remains were found inside the SUV that authorities say hit the aboveground valve on the pipeline, causing the fire.

As authorities worked to identify who had driven the vehicle, residents who were forced to flee the towering blaze returned to assess the damage on Thursday. They found mailboxes and vehicles partially melted by the intense heat, a neighborhood park charred and destroyed and fences burned to the ground.

“Devastated, upset, scared. We don’t know what we’re going to do now,” said Diane Hutto, 51, after finding her home severely damaged by water that firefighters poured on it to keep it from catching fire. Hutto’s home is located only a few hundred feet from the pipeline.

Before the fire went out, its reduced size meant police finally had access to the area around the pipeline. Investigators removed the white SUV and towed it away Thursday morning.

While medical examiners with Harris County were processing the vehicle, they recovered and removed human remains found inside, Deer Park officials said in a statement.

“They will now begin working through their identification process, which will take some time,” officials said.

Officials say the underground pipeline, which runs under high-voltage power lines in a grassy corridor between a Walmart and a residential neighborhood in Deer Park, was damaged when the SUV driver left the store’s parking lot, entered the wide grassy area and went through a fence surrounding the valve equipment.

But authorities have offered few details on what caused the vehicle to crash through the fence and hit the pipeline valve.

Energy Transfer, the Dallas-based company that owns the pipeline, on Wednesday called it an accident. Deer Park officials said preliminary investigations by police and FBI agents found no evidence of a terrorist attack.

The pipeline is a 20-inch-wide (50-centimeter-wide) conduit that runs for miles through the Houston area. It carries natural gas liquids through Deer Park and La Porte, both of which are southeast of Houston.

Authorities evacuated nearly 1,000 homes at one point and ordered people in nearby schools to shelter in place. Officials began letting residents return to their homes on Wednesday evening.

Hutto said Thursday the fire incinerated her home’s backyard fence and partially melted a small shed where her husband stored his lawnmower. Inside the home, mold and mildew were starting to set in from the water damage, and part of the ceiling in her daughter's bedroom had collapsed.

“Everything is just soaking wet,” she said. “It smells bad. I don’t think there’s really anything we can salvage at this point.”

Across the street, Robert Blair found minor damage when he returned to his home Thursday morning. It included broken and cracked windows and a window screen and irrigation system pipes that had been melted by the heat.

“We were very lucky here. It could have been worse,” said Blair, 67.

The pipeline’s valve equipment appears to have been protected by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Energy Transfer has not responded to questions about any other safety protections that were in place.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s top elected official, said Thursday that officials will look at whether they can require companies like Energy Transfer to install better security measures, including concrete structures around pipelines and their aboveground valves.

“If they had that around it, I don’t think this would have happened,” Blair said.

Energy Transfer and Harris County officials have said that air quality monitoring shows no immediate risk to individuals, despite the huge tower of billowing flame that shot hundreds of feet into the air when the fire first began, creating thick black smoke that hovered over the area.

Houston, Texas’ largest city, 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 in the area, including some that have been deadly, raising recurring questions about the adequacy of industry efforts to protect the public and the environment.

Hidalgo said some residents she spoke with told her they don’t feel safe living in the area after this week’s fire.

Hutto, whose husband works in a petrochemical plant, said living near such facilities has always been a concern, but this week’s fire has changed things for her.

“I don’t think I want to live here anymore. I’m just too scared to stay here,” Hutto said.

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A mailbox melted by the heat of a pipeline fire sits in front of a home in Deer Park, Texas, on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Juan A. Lozano)

A truck that had parts of its equipment melted by the heat of a pipeline fire sits in the driveway of a home in Deer Park, Texas, on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Juan A. Lozano)(AP Photo/Juan A. Lozano)

Diane Hutto stands in her home's backyard in Deer Park, Texas, on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024, next to a shed that had been melted by the intense heat from a massive pipeline fire that erupted near her house earlier this week. (AP Photo/Juan A. Lozano)

A room in the home of Diane Hutto in Deer Park, Texas, is filled with damp insulation on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024, after the ceiling was damaged by water that had been used by firefighters to keep at bay the flames and heat from a nearby pipeline fire earlier this week. (AP Photo/Juan A. Lozano)

Workers stand near a pipeline fire in Deer Park, Texas, on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. The fire had dramatically shrunk in size since it began on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024, and officials said they expected it to be extinguished sometime Thursday evening. (AP Photo/Juan A. Lozano)

Traffic is diverted away from Spencer Highway west of East Boulevard near the site of pipeline exposition, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in La Porte, Texas. (Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP)

Large vehicles make their way from a make-shift road between utility lines toward East Pasadena Boulevard as an above-ground valve continues to burn three days after after a vehicle drove through a fence along a parking lot and struck the site, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in La Porte, Texas. (Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP)

Utility work continues electrical lines along the westbound portion of Spencer Highway near the site of pipeline exposition, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in La Porte, Texas. (Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP)

An above-ground valve continues to burn three days after after a vehicle drove through a fence along a parking lot and struck the site, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, in La Porte, Texas. (Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A pair of unwelcome and destructive guests named Helene and Milton have stormed their way into this year's presidential election.

The back-to-back hurricanes have jumbled the schedules of Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, both of whom devoted part of their recent days to tackling questions about the storm recovery effort.

The two hurricanes are forcing basic questions about who as president would best respond to deadly natural disasters, a once-overlooked issue that has become an increasingly routine part of the job. And just weeks before the Nov. 5 election, the storms have disrupted the mechanics of voting in several key counties.

Vice President Harris is trying to use this as an opportunity to project leadership, appearing alongside President Joe Biden at briefings and calling for bipartisan cooperation. Former President Trump is trying to use the moment to attack the administration's competence and question whether it is withholding help from Republican areas, despite no evidence of such behavior.

Adding to the pressure is the need to provide more money for the Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would require House Republicans to work with the Democratic administration. Biden said Friday that Hurricane Milton alone had caused $50 billion in estimated damages.

“Dealing with back-to-back crises will put FEMA under more scrutiny and, therefore, the Biden administration will be under a microscope in the days leading up to the election,” said Timothy Kneeland, a professor at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York, who has studied the issue.

“Vice President Harris must empathize with the victims without altering the campaign schedule and provide consistent messaging on the widespread devastation that makes FEMA’s work even more challenging than normal,” Kneeland added.

Already, Trump and Harris have separately gone to Georgia and North Carolina to assess hurricane damage and pledge support, requiring the candidates to cancel campaign events elsewhere and use up time that is a precious resource in the final weeks before any election. Both Georgia and North Carolina are political battlegrounds, raising the stakes.

The hurricane fallout is evident in the candidates' campaign events as well.

On Thursday, the first question Harris got at a Univision town hall in Las Vegas came from a construction worker and undecided voter from Tampa, Florida. Ramiro Gonzalez asked about talk that the administration has not done enough to support people after Helene and whether the people in Milton's path would have access to aid — a sign that Trump’s messaging is breaking through with some potential voters.

Harris has called out the level of misinformation being circulated by Republicans, but her fuller answer revealed the dynamics at play just a few weeks before an election.

“I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” she said.

On the same day, Trump opened his speech at the Detroit Economic Club by praising Republican governors in the affected states and blasting the Biden-Harris administration.

“They’ve let those people suffer unjustly,” he said about those affected by Helene in North Carolina.

The storms have also scrambled the voting process in places. North Carolina 's State Board of Elections has passed a resolution to help people in the state's affected counties vote. Florida will allow some counties greater flexibility in distributing mail-in ballots and changing polling sites for in-person voting. But a federal judge in Georgia said Thursday the state doesn't need to reopen voter registration despite the disruptions by Helene.

Tension and controversy have begun to override the disaster response, with Biden on Wednesday and Thursday saying that Trump has spread falsehoods that are “un-American.”

Candace Bright Hall-Wurst, a sociology professor at East Tennessee State University, said that natural disasters have become increasingly politicized, often putting more of the focus on the politicians instead of the people in need.

“Disasters are politicized when they have political value to the candidate," she said. "This does not mean that the politicization is beneficial to victims.”

As the Democratic nominee, Harris has suddenly been a major part of the response to hurricanes, a role that traditionally has not involved vice presidents in prior administrations.

On Thursday, she participated virtually at a Situation Room briefing on Milton while she was in Nevada for campaign activities. She has huddled in meetings about response plans and on Wednesday phoned into CNN live to discuss the administration's efforts.

At a Friday briefing with Biden to discuss the hurricanes, Harris repeated a message that subtly ties back into her campaign policies to stop price gouging.

“To any company or individual that is using this crisis to jack up prices through illegal fraud or price gouging, whether it be at the gas pump, the airport or the hotel counter, we will be monitoring and there will be a consequence,” Harris said.

Her newfound importance was such that Biden was nudged to wrap up his remarks so she could speak, prompting him to joke, “She's my boss here.”

Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida late Wednesday and left more than 3 million without power. But the storm surge never reached the same levels as Helene, which led to roughly 230 fatalities and for a prolonged period left parts of North Carolina without access to electricity, cell service and roadways.

Trump and his allies have seized on the aftermath of Helene to spread misinformation about the administration's response. Their debunked claims include statements that victims can only receive $750 in aid as well as false charges that emergency response funds were diverted to immigrants.

The former president said the administration's response to Helene was worse than the George W. Bush administration's widely panned handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which led to nearly 1,400 deaths.

“This hurricane has been a bad one, Kamala Harris has left them stranded," Trump said at a recent rally in Juneau, Wisconsin. “This is the worst response to a storm or a catastrophe or a hurricane that we’ve ever seen ever. Probably worse than Katrina, and that’s hard to beat, right?"

Asked about the Trump campaign's strategic thinking on emphasizing the hurricane response, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it reflects a pattern of “failed leadership” by the Biden-Harris administration that also includes the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and security at the U.S. southern border.

“Kamala has left Americans behind and proven she is not equipped to solve crises at the highest level," Leavitt said.

John Gasper, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has researched government responses to natural disasters, said storm victims generally want to ensure foremost that they get the aid they need.

“These disasters essentially end up being good tests of leadership for local, state and federal officials in how they respond," he said.

But Gasper noted that U.S. politics have gotten so polarized and other issues such as the economy are shaping the election, such that the debate currently generating so much heat between Trump and the Biden-Harris administration might not matter that much on Election Day.

“On the margin, it will matter," he said. "Will it define the election? Probably not. There’s so many other things out there.”

AP writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden speaks about the federal government's response to Hurricanes Milton and Helene as as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm listens, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 11, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

President Joe Biden speaks about the federal government's response to Hurricanes Milton and Helene as as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm listens, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 11, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a meeting of the Detroit Economic Club, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, on the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Chandler, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump talks with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp after speaking at a temporary relief shelter as he visits areas impacted by Hurricane Helene, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024, in Evans, Ga. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, right, receives a briefing from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on the damage from Hurricane Helene, Saturday, October 5, 2024 in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)