By Tim Stonesifer
The Evening Sun
HANOVER, Pa. — Local fire officials are battling more than blazes, as they continue to wade through the bureaucracy for funding they say is necessary to fight future Hanover-area chemical spills.
Penn Township Fire Chief Jan Cromer said last week that plans to secure federal funding for a foam trailer — an apparatus designed to spray a chemical mixture on fires and spills involving hazardous materials — are progressing, if slowly. Local fire officials recently took another step forward, securing a needed federal waiver, he said, but still it’s unlikely any new apparatus will be in place for at least another year.
“The funds probably won’t be here until 2012,” he said. “But at least we’re getting somewhere.”
Hanover Fire Commissioner Jim Roth said the need for a foam trailer stationed in the area is clear. With no other such unit in the York-Adams area, local responders would be forced, in the event of a spill, to wait for help from foam task forces in Cumberland or Lancaster counties, he said.
And with a bad enough spill — of gasoline or ethanol from a tractor-trailer, or chlorine and other chemicals from a railroad car — that could be time area residents don’t have, Roth said.
“Something like that, I just don’t have anything to put that out with right now,” he said. “It’s a problem.”
Cromer and Roth have also spoke in the past of CSX Transportation possibly increasing the amount of chemicals it hauls through the Hanover-Adams County area by rail. CSX officials have not said on the record the company is increasing rail traffic, but new federal rules have led some in southcentral Pennsylvania to think traffic that normally goes through Washington, D.C. and Baltimore might come through this area.
“I don’t know, but I’ve been noticing the trains through here sure are longer these days,” Cromer said last week.
So for more than a year Cromer and Roth have been attending meetings and navigating the bureaucracy, looking to secure the needed funds — anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000, they said — from the Department of Homeland Security for a foam trailer and truck to pull it.
Initially federal officials were requesting the department get a waiver, which Cromer said he has since received, with things to now move on to a new federal committee.
“But it’s a slow process,” he said.
Cromer said he and Roth are scheduled to attend another meeting on the matter in York later this month, and he’s been encouraged by recent progress. Officials have noted the possibility of the trailer’s use in two counties is a nice selling point, he said.
That news — and any progress — can’t come soon enough, Cromer said, with the Hanover area underprepared in case of a chemical spill.
“I think we will get it,” he said, “it’s just a matter of time and patience.”
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