EMERGENCY
RESPONSE FOR ACID SPILL WENT AS PLANNED | LAHONTANVALLEYNEWS.COM, http://www.lahontanvalleynews.com/artic
le/20100907/NEWS/100909927/1055&ParentProfile=1045
After the
city of Fallon declared a state of emergency on Aug. 23 when 10,000
gallons of hydrochloric acid spilled during a delivery at the water
treatment facility, Northern Nevada emergency responders in addition to
the community came together in an impressive response effort.
"Th
ere are very few agencies in the United States that can assess, contain
and clean up a hazardous material spill of this magnitude,=" said
city Emergency Manager Steve Endacott. "Given this challenging
scenario, this is the way it was designed to go
down.="
Due to previous emergency planning, city officials
were confident from the beginning the 10,000 gallons of corrosive
chemical would not seep into the environment. The city installed a
specialized trough beneath the hydrochloric acid tank capable of holding
100 percent of the chemical housed in the building.
"It
was fully contained the first day it occurred,=" said Mayor Ken
Tedford Jr. "The way the building was designed worked
perfectly.="
-----------------------
An
explosion at a chemical factory belonging to China National Petroleum
Corporation (CNPC), located in Fushun, Liaoning Province around noon on
Tuesday has left two people injured. But no deaths have been
reported.
Black smoke was seen billowing from the factory near
the east gate of the compound.
CNPC is China's largest oil
and gas producer and supplier, and the No.3 petrochemical factory was
condoned off soon after the explosion, according to Liaoshen Evening
News, a local daily.
Witnesses said that windows as far as 150 meters away
from the blast were shattered.
-----------------------
DECATUR,
AL (WAFF) - Residents at Summer Manor Apartments in Decatur say, around
9:30 Monday night, they heard what sounded like a bomb going
off.
"I mean, it was a loud boom," said resident Larry
Johnson.
Within minutes, rescue workers cleared out the
building, evacuating about 75 people, but many say they didn't
even know what happened.
"When I walked outside and smelled the fumes, I
knew something wasn't right. I just didn't know what," added
Johnson.
Police say one of their neighbors, 81-year-old Larry
Gene Thurman had set off one of several homemade bombs in his third
floor room.
-----------------------
MEMPHIS,
TN =E2=80=93 Shelby County firefighters battled a chemical fire inside
Pollution Control Industries in North Shelby County.
The fire
started sometime between 12:00 p.m. and 12:30 p.m., Tuesday, September
7, 2010, at Victory Lane, near Fite Road.
According
to Shelby County Fire official Bret Perkins, 40 to 45 employees were
evacuated from the building. Perkins says no injuries were
reported.
The fire was brought under control around 2:30 p.m.
Perkins says the company identified the burning chemical as an oxidizer,
which releases oxygen, making it harder to put out the flames.
Shelby
County Sheriff=E2=80=99s deputies blocked traffic on Fite Road, between
Old Millington and Raleigh Millington. Fite has been reopened,
however Victoria Lane remains closed.
-----------------------
Chalmette Refining, LLC, has set up a toll free number
for people to call in regards to powdery substance that coated many
homes, cars and other property in St. Bernard Parish
Monday.
An electrical outage cause the refinery to release
about 2,000 pounds of a spent catalyst. Officials say it isn't harmful,
but it did create a nuisance for many residents who had to spend their
Labor Day cleaning it up.
In a news release, parish government officials said
"St. Bernard Parish President Craig P. Taffaro, Jr. said he is in
contact with Wil Hinson of Chalmette Refining. The refinery has issued a
toll-free claims number: 1-877-657-2833. Residents can clean substance
as it is not harmful but citizens should photograph the presence on
their property before cleaning."
St. Bernard Parish Fire
Chief Thomas Stone said despite the assurances from the plant that the
chemical isn't dangerous, he said the sand-like nature of it could be
enough to cause problems for people with severe respiratory
illness.
-----------------------
Emergency officials were on the scene Tuesday
afternoon at a building on UK's campus after a small fire in was
reported.
The lincident happened at UK's Chemisty and Physics
building on Rose Street. The building was evacuated.The report initially
came in that there was a fire in the building, then that there was no
fire but a chemical leak. The latest is that there was no leak, but
there was a fire.
So far, there are no reports of any
injuries.
-----------------------
Two people were taken to hospital Tuesday in Ottawa,
and a Natural Resources Canada building was evacuated, after small leak
of hydrogen fluoride gas in a lab.
A malfunctioning lab device
caused the leak around 11 a.m. ET in a seventh-floor laboratory at an
office of the Geological Survey of Canada at 601 Booth
St.
Thirty-five firefighters, including two
hazardous-materials teams, were dispatched to the scene. The building's
300 employees were already leaving the building when crews arrived, fire
department spokesperson Marc Messier said.
Two
people working in the lab at the time of the spill, a 31-year-old man
and a 28-year-old woman, were taken to hospital as a precautionary
measure, paramedics said. The woman had been treated at the scene for
airway irritation.
-----------------------
HAZMAT
TEAM CALLED TO WASTE TRANSFER STATION, http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/
Hazmat+team+called+waste+transfer+station/3488912/story.html
Nine
employees were evacuated from a Surrey waste transfer facility after
experiencing headaches, difficulty breathing and burning in the throat
Monday.
Lorne West, Surrey fire battalion chief, said the fire
department and their hazardous materials specialists had an entry team
do an assessment of the facility with chemical and gas detectors but
were unable to locate the source of the irritant.
"We
didn't work our way through all the trash so the concern is that once
the trash starts to move through again it will recur."
West said
Wastech's Surrey site will be closed while a more specialized hazardous
materials team evaluates the facility.
The
employees were evaluated and treated on site. Their symptoms cleared
after a short time and no workers were hospitalized.
-----------------------
A
jackknifed Walmart tractor-trailer shut down the westbound lanes of
Interstate 4 for several hours.
It happened around 6:30 p.m.
Monday near the Fairbanks Avenue exit.
The lanes were closed for nearly 2.5 hours while crews
cleaned up.
A hazmat team was called to the scene to
clean up 100 gallons of diesel fuel that was spilled.
-----------------------
BRICK =E2=80=94 An unknown
chemical leaking from a commercial storage container has forced
authorities to close off a portion of Burnt Tavern Road as they try to
identify the substance, police said.
No injuries or exposure has
been reported due the leakage from a five-gallon bucket at Public
Storage, a storage rental facility at 935 Burnt Tavern Road, according
to police. Hazmat, police and fire officials were called in at about 4
p.m. after a bystander spotted the leak. They are still there attempting
to identify all the chemicals before doing a cleanup. One lane on Burnt
Tavern remains closed, while the other stays open, police
said.
-----------------------
Chadron)-The Chadron Fire Department has had a busy Labor Day
Holiday. A call was received shortly before noon of a Hazmat call after
a trailer came loose from a vehicle north of Chadron and ran through a
fence on private property. The trailer had a propane tank on it, and
propane was leaking.
A second call came in around 12:15 of a vehicle fire
on the 100 block of Morehead Street. It was reported that a pickup with
books in it was on fire and there were other vehicles around it. Chadron
Police Officers blocked traffic so fire personnel could extinguish the
blaze. The pickup appeared to be immobile and was in a fenced off lot
with other older vehicles. Crews were able to put out the fire very
quickly
-----------------------
A fatal house explosion in July in Norfolk caused by a
propane leak prompted a state investigation that has focused on a
Westfield plant that allegedly shipped potentially dangerous propane
throughout New England.
Millions of gallons of propane sold and distributed
across New England could be lacking the necessary smell that warns
people about leaky gas grills and home heating systems.
That
danger was discovered during an investigation by the state fire marshal
and Attorney General Martha Coakley that found the major distributor of
the liquid fuel in Westfield was allegedly shipping propane without the
federally required chemical odorant.
The propane that leaked into
the house at the elderly residential complex in July did not have the
telltale "rotten egg=E2=80=99=E2=80=99 smell that tells people
propane or natural gas is leaking, said state fire Marshal Stephen D.
Coan.
-----------------------
LOS
ANGELES =E2=80=94 More than five decades after a partial nuclear
meltdown just outside Los Angeles, state and federal officials Friday
announced agreements to remove all contamination and return the atomic
energy and rocket engine test site to its natural
state.
Residents who have fought
for years for cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory heralded the
agreements signed by the Department of Energy, NASA and state officials.
The agreements, which commit to a 2017 cleanup date, must still go
through a public review process before they are
finalized.
"It's more than we'd hoped
for a long time," said Marie Mason, head of a homeowner's association
whose four members have all been sick with leukemia, breast cancer or
serious thyroid conditions. "We are thrilled."
During the Cold War, workers at the site,
then-operated by Rocketdyne, tested more than 30,000 rockets and
experimented with nuclear reactors on the hilltop where now-hollow gray
buildings sit like tombstones.
By the
time the lab was shuttered, testing and several nuclear accidents since
1959 left a toxic stew of radioactive and chemical contamination that
many believed trickled into the communities below, causing breast
cancer, thyroid conditions and a rare eye cancer among
infants.
-----------------------
TEMPLE
(September 4, 2010) - Temple Firefighters got a call at about 9:10 p.m.,
Friday about a strange odor at the Nextel Building off Eberhardt Road.
Several employees inside also had a hard time
breathing.
Six people were taken to teh hospital as a
precaution.
In all, 3 Fire Crews, a Hazmat team, Temple police and
Scott & White EMS responded.
About 125 people were
evacuated.
After further investigation, no hazardous materials or
chemicals were found in the building.
-----------------------
Edward Hospital in Naperville was placed on a
hazardous material alert early Friday afternoon, after a plastic bottle
containing an ammonia-based solution apparently exploded in the hands of
a schoolgirl in unincorporated Will County near
Plainfield.
The mother of the unidentified fifth-grader from
Creekside Elementary School brought her daughter to the emergency room
of the hospital, at 801 S. Washington St.
Naperville police and fire officials stand outside the Edward
Hospital emergency while the Naperville hospital was on "Orange Alert"
on Friday during a hazardous materials response.
(Terence Guider-Shaw/For
Sun-Times Media)
Preliminary reports indicated the girl and at least
some emergency room personnel had been overcome by fumes or sickened by
the contents of the bottle, which the girl's mother had brought into the
building with her.
A "Code Orange," or hazardous situation, alert was
sounded over the hospital's intercom system. Naperville Fire Department
officials then sent that agency's hazardous material truck to the
hospital's emergency room parking area.
-----------------------
A semi truck carrying 4,000 gallons of a hazardous
substance overturned in Dearborn County, shutting down Interstate 74 not
far from the Indiana/Ohio border.
Drivers traveling towards
Cincinnati will need to find a detour. No word yet on how long it will
take to clean up the spill.
The driver told Indiana State Police troopers the
uneven pavement in the construction zone combined with his load caused
the liquid to "slosh" around and caused the semi to drop off the edge of
the interstate. The semi struck a concrete barrier and it overturned,
spilling the load.
The substance is known as Phthalic Anhydride Molton.
It's believed approximately 5-10 gallons were spilled before it was
contained. Troopers said the material is over 300 degrees Fahrenheit and
they won't be able to recover it until it cools before 270 degrees. Once
cool, it will solidify and become more stable.
-----------------------
MAYFIELD HEIGHTS -- ...Police and fire crews had been
on the scene all day working to clear an accident involving a truck that
lost its trailer over a guardrail just after 8:30 a.m.
Friday.
The trailer and barrels of a flammable resin chemical
landed on Marsol Road, near the Marsol Towers apartments and behind
Golden Gate shopping center.
No evacuations have been issued. HAZMAT crews were
cleaning up the resin, a flammable compound used to make
fiberglas.
-----------------------
ERIE,
Colo. (CBS4) =E2=80=95 Colorado Mug Shots Several police agencies were
on the scene of a meth lab in Erie on Friday working to decontaminate
the scene.
The lab was found at a home at 270 Bonanza Drive just
north of Highway 7, near the airport.
Hazmat
teams with the Boulder Couty Drug Task Force and Mountain View Fire
started their operation at the crime scene Thursday
night.
At least 3 people were taken into
custody.
Neighbors told CBS4 there's been strange activity at
the house for years. One woman said people were coming and going at the
house throughout the day and night, and often various vehicles were
being pulled into the garage and having the tires taken on and
off.
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WEST HAVEN =E2=80=94 "Tens of thousands of
gallons" of a flame-suppressing chemical foam is believed to have spread
from a broken pipe fitting at Yale University's West Campus into the
Oyster River, authorities said this morning.
The foam
is not harmful to people, officials said, but fish die off has been
reported.
The Department of Environmental Protection is
overseeing the cleanup, which is the responsibility of Yale University,
DEP spokesman Dwayne Gardner said. The environmental services firm McVac
Environmental has been contracted by Yale to work on the river and is on
scene today, Gardner and West Shore FIre Chief David Collins
said.
The fire protection system is comprised of aqueous
film-forming foam, a material that is 94 percent water and 6 percent
butyl carbitol, West Shore Deputy Chief Patrick Pickering said. DEP
officials were weighing today whether to allow this weekend's expected
rain to clean up the foam, Gardner said.
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