81 Injured, 22 Missing in Blast at Texas Plant : Fireball: Debris is hurled for miles. The Houston ship channel and a highway are closed.

Explosions rocked a Phillips Petroleum Co. plastics plant Monday, hurling chunks of metal and other debris miles away and creating a fireball visible for 15 miles. More than 80 people were known injured, authorities said.

Mayor John Ray Harrison said fire officials had told him that 22 people had not been accounted for more than four hours after the first explosion, and there were fears that at least some had died.

” . . . How many, we don’t know,” said Dr. Paul Pepe, director of emergency services for Houston. “It could be three or four, or it could be more.”

Flames and intense heat were keeping rescue workers from getting close enough to investigate, Pepe said.

At least 81 people were injured and were being treated at several hospitals for burns, breathing problems and cuts from flying debris, Pepe said. Seventy-two were plant workers. Nine non-employees suffered breathing difficulties or injuries from flying debris. Two burned women were described as being in critical condition.

The blasts buckled a ceiling and blew out windows at an elementary school cafeteria about a mile away. None of the more than 700 pupils were injured, and they were all sent home, a school employee said.

The explosions also shook buildings and broke glass at a nearby shopping mall, knocked out telephone lines in Pasadena and broke windows at Pasadena City Hall, 3 miles away.

At the plant, leaking gas and broken water lines hampered firefighters, Phillips environmental director Bill Stoltz, who was at the scene, said. Firefighters were pumping water from a sewage treatment plant and the nearby Houston Ship Channel. At least five fire departments sent firemen to the scene.

Ambulances lined roadways to the complex, which sprawls over 800 acres.

Several fires were visible beneath columns of dense smoke in the plant complex, and patches of grass smoldered outside.

“A siren went off and, as we were evacuating . . . you could see a low fire coming down through the unit . . . and then the whole thing went up,” said Bill Mann, who works at the facility and was about 150 yards from the explosions. “The compression came our way and knocked everybody down.”

Another witness, Joe Baccus, said: “When I came out of my office, I could see a huge explosion. It looked like an atomic bomb going off.”

Kelly Manerly, a pipe fitter at the plant, said he heard hissing for about five minutes, then saw a white cloud.

“I told a safety man I saw nothing but gas. Then it exploded. I ran. There were a lot of people running and screaming to get out. It’s like nothing I’ve felt in my life,” Manerly said. “I’m real lucky. Thank God for that.”

Maintenance worker Roby Clemons said that a warning message had been broadcast over the plant’s emergency radio 20 seconds before the explosion.

“I never saw people run so fast,” he said.

Stoltz said the explosion occurred when a seal blew out on an ethylene loop reactor, releasing ethylene-isobutane, a compound used in making plastics. The plant manufactures plastics like those used in milk jugs and toys.

He said firefighters were staying back from the main fires because of fears of more explosions.

Although the chemicals are not toxic, they are “highly explosive,” Stoltz said.

More than 900 people work in shifts at the plant, built in 1948 on the Houston Ship Channel, said Dave Dryden, Phillips spokesman at company headquarters in Bartlesville, Okla.

The Coast Guard, fearing that the blaze could set off fires on the fuel tankers that sail the channel, closed a 2-mile length of the waterway, Petty Officer Dawn Isbell said. No ships reported damage.

About 2 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products a day are moved up and down the 50-mile-long channel, which connects Houston with the Gulf of Mexico.

“I went to the bank, which was several miles from the area, and I could feel it shake,” said Betty Parks, a police spokeswoman in Pasadena, just outside Houston.

The first explosion at Phillips’ Houston Chemical Complex, just off Texas Highway 225 less than 10 miles southeast of downtown Houston, occurred about 1 p.m., Parks said.

Several explosions ensued, witnesses reported.

Seismologists at Rice University in Houston said the blast appeared to be the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT.

Officials closed a section of Highway 225, Parks said, but thousands of people lined up along freeways to watch yellow and green flames shooting from the plant.

Baccus said he felt the explosion at his business at least 15 miles away and could see the flames and smoke.

“I just saw a few minutes ago a huge fireball that’s plainly visible. I’m now looking at the smoke, and it appears like three different fire centers; one is gigantic and two off to the side of it,” he said.

“The flames are very tall. You can see the flames above the horizon,” he said.

“I could see all kinds of debris in the air,” witness Roy Berry said. “There were sheets of aluminum about 4 to 6 feet long falling. The air is saturated with material. I knew immediately what it was.”

Glen Dickey, who lives 5 miles from the plant, said he found a 6-foot piece of metal in a tree at his home.

“Pieces of stuff were falling out of the sky. I got over there to my house, and my neighbors . . . were walking out . . . picking up pieces of metal and insulation off the roads,” Dickey said.

He said that he and his wife were at a restaurant eating lunch when “all of a sudden the whole building shook.”

“Some people started hollering: ‘Earthquake!’ ”