Hazmat disasters
Published: 01 January, 2006
The peace of a quiet morning on Sunday, December 11th, 2005, was shattered by a series of explosions at Buncefield, an oil depot located just north of London - initiating the biggest fire of its type seen in Europe since 1945.
The peace of a quiet morning on Sunday, December 11th, 2005, was shattered by a series of explosions at Buncefield, an oil depot located just north of London - initiating the biggest fire of its type seen in Europe since 1945.
It took three days to extinguish all of the fires and firefighting operations using foam concentrates at Buncefield may have introduced potentially hazardous chemicals into the groundwater and, ultimately, into London’s water supply.
An eyewitness told IFJ that 3M Lightwater ATC FC600 foam concentrate, a PFOS-based foam - was amongst others used onsite during the firefighting operations which used up more than 250 tons of foam concentrate (not all of it PFOS-linked).
It has been established that PFOS has a very unfavorable persistence-bioaccumulation-toxicity (PBT) profile and any discharge to groundwater would result in long-term environmental consequences. No-one knows what its half-life is. The lithium salt in PFOS is a registered US EPA insecticide which kills bees and wasps. The long-term effects on humans are not known. But disturbances to liver and hormone metabolism and birth defects in rat embryos as well as potential carcinoma of the prostate in human have been highlighted.
The chemical feedstock used in the manufacture of 3M PFOS-type fluorosurfactants is perfluorooctanyl sulphonyl fluoride (C8F17SO2F). In the environment the fluorosurfactants degrade to give perfluoro-octanyl sulphonate (PFOS).
Finished foam or foam concentrate does not contain free PFOS unless it has degraded. Scientists have found traces of PFOS in people and animals species around the world and as a substance it has been linked to disturbances in lipid and steroid metabolism and has also been implicated in prostatic carcinoma and human bladder conditions.
Currently, the run-off has been collected into specially-constructed dykes and is to be pumped to storage facilities at the site. As a precaution Three Valleys Water has closed the drinking water boreholes.
Ironically, the search for potential HazMat pollutants following the Buncefield fires had focussed on the smoke and soot generated by the fires. This contained toxic elements such as hydrochloric acid, carbon-monoxide, oxidised nitrogen and acrolein.
Ian Colbeck, professor of aerosol science at the University of Essex, commented on the risk factors:
“When petroleum is burned in a car it is burned under controlled conditions to minimise emissions. At Buncefield it was burning freely so you’re getting a vast amount of particulate matter produced and also you may get various chemicals being absorbed onto the particulate matter - some sort of benzene, and that is carcinogenic.”
Environmental experts have been monitoring HazMat/pollution levels across southern England as the plume of smoke from the Hertfordshire fuel depot blasts drifted south using a research plane, normally employed to investigate climate change. No adverse effects have been reported as a result of the smoke plume.
Hurricanes cause HazMat problems
for USA
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have left the Gulf Coast a toxic heritage. Working with industry experts the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been assisting in the clean up of hazardous materials around the area with the latest technology available.
“In terms of overall impact, these two hurricanes have created the largest incident to which the NOAA has ever responded,” David Kennedy, director of the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration, told IFJ.
The long-term effects of the two hurricanes will have major consequences for the region. Over a 1,000 oil pollution reports were received in the aftermath. Five of these were designated as major spills, which means that they are bigger than 100,000 gallons while another 5 were classified as medium spills (between 10,000 and 50,000 gallons).
The NOAA expects that the removal of all hazardous chemical and oil spills will last up to a year. The clean-up is carried out in co-operation with the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Coast Guard and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
To assist in co-ordinating response and restoration efforts NOAA has set up special Scientific Support Teams in each of the joint federal state agency command posts based in Alexandria, Baton Rouge Louisiana; Mobile Alabama, Austin and Houston Texas.
The teams provide a broad range of scientific and technical expertise and data. They have been assisting the US Coast Guard in making determinations of where and when to open navigational passageways to both emergency and commercial traffic.
Even before Hurricane Katrina hit land the Administration’s Scientific Support Coordinators provided critical infrastructure assessments and discussed possible points of impact and had personnel waiting to tackle any problems in the region.
The HazMat issues on the Gulf
In addition to that the NOAA has been utilising the latest technology to make critical determinations where responders can enter potentially dangerous areas. The field teams have been using remote sensing equipment and aerial photography to enable them to make maps of flooded areas as well as situation maps of pollution incidents and salvage operations.
A spokesman for the NOAA told IFJ: “One of the most innovative technologies being applied is combining LIDAR (airborne laser used to measure topography) and satellite imagery to create maps of flooding in New Orleans. The organisation is also assisting in tracking the progress of removing water from the flooded areas, as well as identifying location of contaminant spills and condition of critical energy industry infrastructure through various mapping techniques.”
All petroleum facilities are systematically reviewed from the Galveston area on the west to as far east as Pensacola in Florida. The scientific support teams advise the Coast Guard on ways to control and clean-up spills throughout the region, ensuring that additional damage to the environment does not occur during this stage.
Another challenge faced by the Hazmat responders on the Gulf Coast is the removal of the many sunken or grounded vessels which may be carrying potential pollutants. The teams will give priority to those craft that pose the biggest environmental threat.
NOAA efforts reflect a federal response aimed at restoring the economic lifeline of the region. A NOAA-sponsored National Ocean Economics Program study, using 2003 Bureau of Labor statistics, shows that in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama 59 percent of the employment in the natural resource and mining sector, which includes oil and gas production, comes from the 80 counties most severely impacted by the storm.
“The NOAA commitment to the region will be long-lasting,” explains William Conner, chief of the NOAA Hazardous Materials Response Division. “We have people in the impact zone and around the country working seven days a week to support and evaluate hazardous material spills.”
What happens next, post-Katrina?
As spills are identified, prioritised and clean-up begins, the organisation’s second response component turns into the NOAA Damage Assessment and Restoration Program, created after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
The program provides permanent expertise within NOAA to assess and restore natural resources injured by oil and hazardous substance releases as well as physical impacts, such as ship groundings.
DARP brings a multidisciplinary team of biologists, economists, attorneys, and policy analysts to work with other designated federal and state co-trustees to assess and quantify injuries; develop and evaluate restoration alternatives and implement restoration projects.
“The scope of the damage in the area is enormous,” says Pat Montanio, chief of the NOAA Damage Assessment Center. “NOAA and its fellow trustees will need to assess both the short-term and long-term impacts to the sensitive ecosystems along this valuable coastline. As that process moves forward, we will make the determinations necessary, with both state and public input and guidance, on how best to proceed in restoring this environment with projects that will benefit both their communities and the natural resources of the region.”
Songhua River contaminated
Experts have been shocked by the scale of a disaster which affected China on November 13th, 2005. The Songhua river was contaminated by a petrochemical explosion and toxic spill. There were five dead, 70 injured and 3.5 million people left without water supplies.
An accident by workers led to a massive blast which shook the Jilin Chemical Industrial Co. plant - a PetroChina benzene factory - at Jilin, a city about 380 kilometers up river from Harbin. Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang province in northeastern of China.
The force of the explosion allowed 100 tonnes of chemicals, mainly benzene, to surge into the river Songhua. The Songhua river runs into the Amur river and then into Russia. The Songhua river is Harbin’s main water source.
By November 23rd, an 80-km stretch of contaminated water reached Harbin. The authorities shut down water extraction pumps leaving around 3.5 million people temporarily without access to water. The authorities increased water flows upstream to dilute pollutants and provided bottled water for the population.
TV stations advised citizens about the condition of the water by using a traffic light motif: a red light broadcast meant the water was unusable, yellow that it was suitable for bathing only and green meant the water was once again safe to drink.
The Russian authorities used more than 50 tonnes of chemicals to tackle the spill by treating the benzene with activated charcoal in the water treatment plant along the river Amur into which the Songhua flows.
Zhai Pingyang, a senior environmental health officer told a Chinese newspaper: “Most pollutants come from the Jilin plant run by the China National Petroleum Corporation. Ever since the chemical plant has been built in the 1950s this company has been inseparably linked to a drop in the quality of the river water.”
Another official at the Harbin Water Company said that three days after the blast at the Jilin plant, the water company had secretly sent a team of environmental officials and staff to the river to collect water samples.
“We have dealt with this plant numerable times. Every time the river was polluted, Jilin, which is on the upper reaches, issued reports that no pollution was found in their waters. Countless interactions have led to countless confrontations,” the water official said.
When the government sent in investigation teams the plant officials started up the water treatment plant. As soon as they left the water treatment was halted, to save on costs. An official report is expected soon.
