TCEQ Doesn’t Know What’s Burning In Juarez

EL PASO — Twenty-four hours after an industrial fire first sent a thick, black column of smoke into the skies over of El Paso and Jurez, wisps of smoke still puffed from an industrial area in South Jurez.

Wednesday’s strong south-southwest winds continue to push the acrid smoke into the Lower Valley.

“If the wind is blowing it’s blowing up to our side all that pollution,” said Michael Jacquez, of the Lower Valley. “We don’t know what’s burning.”

And it turns out the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn’t know, either. A spokeswoman from Austin said the TCEQ hadn’t contacted anybody from that plant in Juarez to find out what they manufacture or what might have gone up in smoke.

Andrea Morrow said the TCEQ’s jurisdiction stops and the stateline and so does the agency’s obligation to figure out what’s on fire there.

She said, though, the TCEQ would use these exisiting monitors to figure out what’s airborne in El Paso.

But the ABC-7 learned that the TCEQ has a history of setting up special air monitors.

They did it in April 2007 after a persistent fire at a compost heap in Helotes sent sent a cloud of smoke over the Hill Country.

The heap was made up of stumps and limbs, a TCEQ spokesman told KSAT-TV at the time.