A huge fire broke out at an industrial park near Rotterdam on Wednesday, setting off chemical explosions, releasing toxic smoke and disrupting shipping between the country's second-biggest city and Antwerp.
The fire started at a Chemie-Pack chemical plant in the Moerdijk industrial zone, about 25 miles south of Rotterdam, on Wednesday afternoon. The cause of the blaze was unknown and police said there were no reports of any casualties.
Authorities warned residents to stay indoors and keep doors and windows shut.
Television images show a towering plume of thick smoke churning out of the fire and several powerful blasts, apparently as storage tanks exploded.
Police spokesman Willem van Hooijdonk told national broadcaster NOS that "poisonous, flammable and corrosive" chemicals were stored at the company, but Moerdijk Mayor Wim Denie told a press conference that measurements had not detected fumes at a level that could form a health risk.
With the fire still blazing late Wednesday, firefighters said they would extinguish the flames under a "blanket of foam" and warned it could initially increase the amount of smoke.
Shipping traffic at the Hollands Diep river, close to the Moerdijk area, was halted, a spokesman for the Dutch ministry of security and justice said.
A spokesman for Rotterdam port, Europe's biggest, said the impact on traffic between Rotterdam and Antwerp was limited.
The petrochemical complexes of Antwerp and Rotterdam are linked by pipeline and an inland waterway. Rotterdam supplies raw materials for Antwerp's petrochemical industry.
A spokesman for Royal Dutch Shell said the company's refinery, located about a mile from the burning chemical plant, was unaffected and that the wind was blowing smoke in the opposite direction from the refinery.
The fire later expanded to an adjacent factory of Finnish engineering firm Wartsila but there was no danger to the Shell refinery, a police spokesman said.
Wartsila has a logistics center in the area, according to its website.
