Gov. Greg Abbott spoke to Judge Branick on Wednesday. The governor posted on Twitter that several state agencies were involved, including the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and said he and his staff were working with local officials “to ensure they have all resources needed to respond to this.”

Refinery and plant explosions are an unfortunate yet common occurrence in oil-rich Texas.

Residents who live near sprawling oil and chemical complexes in parts of southeast and east Texas grow as accustomed to fires and false alarms as Oklahomans do to tornadoes and as Californians do to earthquakes. Jefferson County alone is home to four refineries and 32 chemical plants, and the history of the wider region can be told in some ways through explosions. The worst industrial accident in American history unfolded 100 miles west of Port Neches: On April 16, 1947, hundreds of people were killed in Texas City after a blast on a ship carrying ammonium nitrate set off huge fires.

“That thought sits in the back of your mind because there are refineries everywhere,” Ashlyn McDaniel, 23, an insurance agent who grew up in Port Neches, said from her apartment in Nederland, where she was defying an evacuation order.

“We’ve all thought, ‘What if one of these things goes up in flames one day?’” she said. “But we never really imagined it would happen.”

The scope and timing of the Port Neches evacuation — affecting more than 10 percent of Jefferson County’s 255,000 residents and coming before the holiday — alarmed residents and officials.

The evacuation order included all those living in Port Neches, along with the cities of Groves, Nederland and the northern part of Port Arthur, as well as the unincorporated communities of Central Gardens and Beauxart Gardens.

All day long, Parrish Bird watched the “ominous gray and green” smoke boiling at the plant from Nederland, a town of 17,500.