The Northern suburbs of Toledo, Ohio turned into a real life Don DeLillo novel overnight, after an explosion at a chemical facility sent plumes of industrial compounds billowing into the sky.
According to the local station WTOL11, the blast happened at a chemical distribution site in Ohio’s Lucas County on Tuesday night, prompting an immediate evacuation order for anybody living within one mile of the disaster zone. Those within three miles were given an order to shelter in place.
In a press conference on Wednesday, city emergency officials explained that the leaking chemical exhaust is glycidyl methacrylate, an industrial manufacturing chemical broadly suspected to be carcinogenic to humans.
Maps show numerous residential neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity, the closest being a trailer park just 0.25 miles as the crow flies from the site of the chemical explosion. The nearby Ottawa river, a tributary of Lake Erie, is situated under a half mile to the South.
Complicating matters for first responders and any broader evacuation order is the onset of a fog alert, which combined with the hazmat emergency has turned Toledo into America’s apocalypse zone du jour.
Images circulated by WTOL11 on Facebook show the cataclysmic scenes unfolding across the city, with commenters expressing confusion over whether the clouds of haze were caused by the airborne chemical leak, the fog, or a noxious mix of both.
“I can’t see out my window,” one Toledo resident wrote. “Should I and my dog leave?”
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