KATY, TX (Covering Katy News - updated at 8:45 a.m. 2/13/23) - The smell of Ammonia was still in the air outside of the 99 Cent Only warehouse on Monday morning after emergency response crews spent hours at the facility on Sunday.
The facility is on Colonial Parkway near Highway 99 and I-10.
Covering Katy visited the area around the facility at 8 a.m. Monday morning. The smell of Ammonia was evident on the Mercantile Parkway side of the facility near the back of Memorial Hermann Hospital. However, the smell was not nearly as powerful as on Sunday morning when a shelter-in-place was in effect for several hours. It has since been lifted.
“My daughter and I could smell it inside our car, and we had the windows up,” said Covering Katy owner Dennis Spellman who was driving north on Highway 99 Sunday morning. “The odor came in through our vents, he said.”
The chemical that was leaking was anhydrous Ammonia, which can cause irritation to the nose and throat and cause breathing problems.
“There was actually maintenance being performed at the time ... we don’t know the full ins and outs. We’re going to be conducting an investigation to try to determine what happened so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Harris County Fire Marshal Assistant Chief Chad Shaw told KHOU on Sunday.