If your Gregg County business stores chemicals, you may owe a Tier II report

This reaches more places than you'd guess: not just the refineries and chemical plants that grew up with the East Texas oil field, but feed stores, plating shops, water plants, and warehouses. The trigger is quantity. Store 10,000 pounds or more of a hazardous chemical at any one time, or 500 pounds of an extremely hazardous substance (or its threshold planning quantity, whichever is smaller), and Texas treats you as a Tier II filer.

If that's you, the inventory is due every year by March 1, covering the prior calendar year. You can start the report in the state's online system in November, but it won't accept a submission until January 1. The point of all this is so that when a Longview or Kilgore fire crew rolls up to your building at 2 a.m., they already know what's stored inside before they open a door.

Gregg County runs a Local Emergency Planning Committee for exactly that reason, co-chaired by Fire Marshal Brian Russell and Jonathan Prior, reachable at 903-237-2522. Local Tier II submissions go to [email protected]. If you're genuinely unsure whether your inventory crosses a threshold, TCEQ's 'Am I Regulated?' page walks the quantities one chemical at a time before you commit to filing.