Susan Carroll

SANTA FE — Travis Stanich smoked a Marlboro behind his house in the predawn darkness Friday as his stepson slipped out the back door. “I’ve just got to get through one more day,” Jared Black said to Stanich, looking forward to his birthday party on Saturday. Jared, quiet and kind, turned 17 on Wednesday. The Staniches bought a new above-ground pool and filled it up in preparation for the party. Stanich watched Jared leave, heading down the old farm road toward the bus stop, bound for Santa Fe Hi…

About 400 trucks a day loaded with hazardous chemicals pass within a mile of densely populated areas, the Houston Chronicle has found.

This story published online Thursday, Dec. 7 and appeared in print Saturday, Dec. 9. Inside a squat, brick building at the base of Barker reservoir, Richard Long tossed and turned in his cot near midnight. Dread and adrenaline kept him from drifting off. Water levels at the Addicks and Barker dams west of Houston, the city’s primary defense during a major storm, were rising faster than he’d seen in his 38 years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Addicks had climbed 28 feet since Hurricane Ha…

Three friends borrowed a boat to help people stranded in Houston’s high water. Their boat capsized in Cypress Creek, setting off a search for survivors.

For years, one family was repeatedly denied access to special education. Then they moved to Pennsylvania.

Early on a Saturday morning, deep inside a chemical plant in La Porte, Javier Ortiz took his last sip of coffee. Paramedics tried to load him onto a helicopter, but he refused until they let him call his wife. [...] the one agency with a specific mandate to investigate chemical accidents that result “in a fatality, serious injury, or substantial property damages” did not send anyone to La Porte. Much like the National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s mission is to fi…

JACKSONVILLE – Charles Bolchoz called the owners of T2 laboratories at 1:23 p.m. on a Wednesday. The cooling jacket on a 2,450-gallon reactor wasn’t working, he told them. The temperature inside was over 360 degrees Fahrenheit and climbing. T2, a chemical manufacturing company with 12 employees, was co-founded by a chemical engineer and a chemist. That December day in 2007, they were making their 175th batch of a fuel additive known as MCMT. One of the owners, Mike Wyatt, searched for the plant’…

Dressed in a plastic protective suit, goggles and a hard hat, he and three other workers had planned to vacuum out the liquid in Giddens’ truck and transfer it to another tank. [...] incidents - defined as runaway reactions that can trigger explosions, fires or releases - killed someone, on average, every two months in the United States for the 21 years ending in 2001. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, only considers toxicity and flammability - not reactivity - under its Risk M…