By Wade Rawlins and Toby Coleman
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
Copyright 2006 The News and Observer
The cause of the explosive fire at Environmental Quality Co.'s chemical waste storage facility in Apex might never be known, the lead investigator with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board said Thursday.
“The evidence is extensively destroyed,” Robert Hall, the lead investigator, said Thursday. “We basically have a pile of ash and burned out barrels.”
The four-member team from the CSB has wrapped up its on-scene assessment and employee interviews and will return to Washington, D.C., to continue sifting through documents. It will decide within two to three weeks, Hall said, whether to expand its inquiry into a full investigation if it decides there are lessons from the event that could prevent similar accidents.
The fire started Oct. 5 with a series of explosions and was fueled by hundreds of containers of chemical waste that were stored on site awaiting disposal. Concerned about toxic air, Apex town leaders urged thousands of residents to evacuate for more than a day.
Hall said the investigation might yield suggestions about likely scenarios of what occurred without pinpointing a cause.
A.J. Attar, a chemical engineer and owner of Appealing Products, which has developed chemical detection devices for the federal government, said EQ’s inventory list of chemicals on site the night of the fire had “every possible evil thing that one can imagine.”
“I’m not sure how much survived the fire,” Attar said. “If any survived, it is bad news.”
Attar speculated that one of the chemicals present that night, methyl ethyl ketone peroxide — used in industrial processes to make plastics — was very volatile.
“That might have been part of the cause of the explosion,” he said. “It will have a tendency to explode.”
He said he was concerned that small amounts of certain toxic compounds such as arsenic and mercury, which would not be destroyed by fire, might have deposited as a film on windshields and playground slides and remain undetected.
“My fear right now is ... people, particularly kids, can touch them and create hazards that are longer term,” Attar said.
Tests done this week in a gym next door to the EQ warehouse found mercury in the vents and nickel in the women’s bathroom, according to the building’s owner.
The findings came after the Environmental Protection Agency gave the building a clean bill of health.
Jean Sciacca, owner of Apex Gymnastics, said she had environmental tests done to make sure that her building was clean after the fire. “I think it’s just common sense when you’ve got a big, black cloud of chemicals over the gym,” she said.
She is keeping her gym closed until she can clean the building and confirm that its air and surfaces are clear of heavy metals and other pollutants.
Nobody is quite sure yet how the mercury and nickel got into the gym.
EQ spokesman Bob Doyle said his company will work with Sciacca to figure out where the heavy metals came from.
Hall said that the Chemical Safety Board had requested an extensive list of documents from the company and the company was cooperating. Among the files it sought were operating manuals, emergency plans and training records. He said employees were supposed to complete 40-hour training courses.
“We want to make sure employees were adequately trained for the job they were doing,” Hall said. “That is one of the areas we are very concerned with.”
The CSB, an independent federal agency, investigates chemical accidents and makes recommendations to industry and government to prevent them. Whatever the board finds can’t be used for criminal or civil fines because it has only advisory authority.
Two state agencies — the Division of Waste Management and the Department of Labor — are conducting separate investigations to see whether any civil violations occurred.
“We are still collecting information to determine if there are any violations,” said Cathy Akroyd, a spokeswoman for the Division of Waste Management. “We haven’t made that determination. That could be a matter of weeks.”
North Carolina has a program that sends inspectors to the 11 chemical storage and transfer facilities similar to EQ for weekly unannounced inspections.
Because it was also a workplace accident, the state Department of Labor has assigned six people to investigate.
“We’ll try to figure out what happened, what caused the accident,” said Juan Santos, a labor spokesman, adding that the investigation could take months. “Were there any standards that apply to a facility of that type that were violated?”
Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response and former chief investigator for the EPA ombudsman, said a state investigation would be more narrow in scope and would not look for similarities with the company’s accident in Romulus, Mich., last year.
He questioned the state inspectors’ finding a week earlier that the plant was in compliance, suggesting that could reflect lax enforcement.
“The state does not have authority and will not investigate if there is any pattern or practice on the part of this company at any of its other facilities,” Kaufman said. “The state can’t subpoena people in Michigan, and they can’t investigate themselves.”
The EPA reached an agreement this week for the state Division of Waste Management to lead the investigation.
“The Environmental Protection Agency is the only entity that can investigate a systematic problem and take action on it,” Kaufman said. “There is no other entity that has those broad authorities, not the state and not the Chemical Safety Board.”