A Devastating Flood. Unlabeled chemicals flooded

In 2018, floodwaters tore through Sonora, Texas, destroying over 200 homes and wiping out a chemical manufacturing site: Petro Plus Chemical. Containers holding unknown substances were carried nine miles downstream, many without labels or hazard markings. The event became not just a natural disaster, but a high-risk chemical incident requiring weeks of painstaking HazMat response.

“It was one of the most chaotic responses I’ve ever led,” recalls Randy Pike, Incident Commander on the scene.

Randy’s team had to manually test hundreds of containers by taking individual samples and cautiously mixing them to detect reactivity. “If nothing reacted, we pumped it into a vac truck. One time, though, something reacted — and it got exciting real quick,” he says.

Without identification tools on hand, the process was slow, dangerous, and expensive.

“If we’d had the Arx mkII with the Capillary Probe on-site, we could have cleared the entire area in a day or two instead of weeks,” Randy adds. “It would’ve saved the customer hundreds of thousands of dollars”.