Video: Fire Extinguished At New Albany Biodiesel Plant

[jwplatform Dp9CU4zs]

New Albany, Miss. (WCBI) – The fire at the JNS Biofuels Plant was extinguished Thursday evening. Local, state, and federal officials also took preliminary steps to start their investigation to determine what sparked the blast that destroyed the plant.

Thursday night a Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said firefighters and environmental officials were trying contain runoff from the 100,000 gallons of foam that was needed to extinguished the flames.

Union County EMA Director Curt Clayton says officials waited until they were sure there would not be another explosion at the site before sending in firefighters. He says officials were deal with 160,000 flammable material at the plant.

“It did exactly what we thought it was going to do, we had two more explosions after the first one and if we had went in there and put our firemen in there trying to put the fire out they would have been right in the middle of the explosion,” said Clayton.

He says precautions continue to be taken to protect first responders and local residents.

“We are still monitoring the air, there has been no sign of any air pollution whatsoever since yesterday when the air monitoring started, we are going to be monitoring air throughout the night and still be monitoring the air into tomorrow, they will be monitoring gases that come off the site down there as they are doing everything so air monitoring is still going to be everything,” explained Clayton.

Highway 15 is scheduled to open at 6 AM Friday.

New Albany Schools will be open Friday.