By Toby Coleman
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
Copyright 2006 The News and Observer
APEX, N.C. — Few noticed the EQ Industrial Services Co. warehouse on Investment Boulevard until it turned into a volcano.
Parents did not fret about sending children to gymnastics lessons next door to the inconspicuous building. A developer put up townhouses on a nearby parcel.
Most in the neighborhoods around the warehouse learned of its existence in rushed conversations late Oct. 5. The warehouse was on fire, and the noxious plume of smoke forced firefighters to retreat and let it burn.
“I had no idea,” said Kathy Digeso, who has lived for a year in a townhouse a few hundred feet from the warehouse. “It’s not something you expect in Apex.”
It was not something that town leaders and regulators expected, either. Apex officials say the EQ warehouse was so quiet and unobtrusive, they largely forgot about the explosive potential of the materials inside.
“They became obscure,” said Town Council member Bill Sutton, who served as town manager from 1993 to 2001. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Some people in Apex had fretted about the warehouse in the early ‘90s, when its then-owners were taking steps to make it a temporary storage facility for hazardous waste. But after that, worry died down and town leaders let builders put up more than 600 homes within a mile of the warehouse.
The explosive revelation that a chemical warehouse was in suburban Apex exposed a crack in the regulations created to protect people from industrial accidents. Despite all the permits and the inspections that hazardous-waste handlers must obtain, little is done to stop people from moving in around them.
Children’s gyms, a church and dozens of homes surround Environmental Quality’s Apex warehouse.
Elsewhere in Wake County, a waste-processing facility operated by Safety-Kleen Systems is close to a church and several residences in a rural area south of Raleigh and west of the Garner town limits.
In the Granville County town of Creedmoor, 16 miles northeast of Durham, a day-care center is situated a short distance across and down the street from a chemical way station.
Invisible danger
People forget that these places are dangerous because there’s not a list of the stored chemicals hanging on the front gate, said Hope Taylor-Guevara, executive director of Clean Water for North Carolina, an environmental group.
“It just looks like a warehouse,” she said. “There is really very little understanding just how dangerous these facilities are.”
Local and state authorities have not helped, either. In Apex, officials did not raise red flags as homes and businesses rose around the EQ warehouse. Last year, state regulators looked at zoning maps of the increasingly suburban neighborhood and decided to let EQ store hazardous waste there until at least 2015.
“It was somewhat forgotten,” said Sutton, the town board member. “But it’s not forgotten now.”
Investment Boulevard is now a suburban back road lined by indoor roller hockey rinks, a storage facility and a cabinetmaker.
But when workers began stocking hazardous waste there in 1987, it was a dead-end street at the edge of town close to an asphalt plant.
That made it easier for EnviroChem Environmental Services, the warehouse’s original owner, to win the state’s permission to operate a way station for barrels of pesticides, cylinders of trashed solvents and pails of old medicine. Apex leaders also green-lighted expansions and changes to the warehouse, but only after saying that they would not have let EnviroChem into town in 1987 if they had known what they were doing.
Over the years, the gray warehouse behind the chain-link fence blended into the background -- even as homes and buildings went up around it. David Rowland, the town planning director, said that proximity to the chemical way station was never an issue when the town was considering proposals to develop nearby land.
“You really didn’t know they were there,” Rowland said.
When EQ obtained the plant from EnviroChem three years ago, the Michigan-based company continued the tradition of keeping its head down. It stayed out of the local Chamber of Commerce and never approached the town’s fire department about running a chemical emergency drill -- something it was not required to do.
“Normally, this is a pretty quiet business,” said Scott Maris, the company vice president of regulatory affairs. “That’s what we want.”
The company’s hushed style paid dividends last year during its effort to renew its state hazardous-waste storage permit. At the public hearing, nobody showed up to complain or fret about EQ’s presence in Apex. Town officials also stayed silent, according to state records.
Rude awakening
The warehouse’s anonymity vanished into thick, noxious smoke about 10 p.m. Oct. 5.
The fumes blanketed Investment Boulevard and rolled down Olive Street. They enveloped the small arbor where Jean Travers and her husband had renewed their wedding vows a few weeks earlier. As chemicals inside the warehouse exploded, police began to tell people to evacuate.
“To hear it was wild,” said Travers, 45, a meeting planner. “At first there was a ka-boom, and then boom, ba-boom, boom, boom, boom.”
Amid the flash of soaring fireballs, Travers and thousands of others in Apex began to wonder about the neighbor they never knew.
“How were they able to be in a residential area?” asked Digeso, the resident of the nearby townhouse. “I don’t know. It’s a scary thing.”
Soon, town leaders started to learn about a side of EQ they never knew. Months before the fire, for instance, state regulators fined the company $32,000 because a worker at the Apex warehouse helped pump flammable caustic waste into a tanker truck that later released chemical vapor.
They also learned about the chemicals inside the warehouse. At the time of the fire, the inventory included about 2,700 containers -- barrels, cylinders, pails and smaller items. They held toxic heavy metals such as mercury; benzene, an additive to gasoline that is carcinogenic; potassium cyanide, used in electroplating and as an insecticide; and pentachlorophenol, a wood preservative and pesticide.
EQ said that most of those chemicals were contained in familiar products found in many homes, and company officials do not think the fire will cause any long-term health problems for its neighbors. They said tests done in the days after the fire have not found any dangerous compounds in the neighborhood’s air or water.
A closer look
Still, town leaders said they were concerned. At a news conference Tuesday in front of Town Hall, Mayor Keith Weatherly demanded more information about the contents of the warehouse.
“There were substances that were stored there that should give real concern to anybody in Apex,” he said.
The next day, Town Manager Bruce Radford hired a team of environmental consultants to scrutinize EQ’s inventory list and environmental tests. He said he did it because residents deserved to know more about the contents of the long-ignored warehouse.
“I know professional toxicologists have a way of explaining it to appear minimalistic,” he said, “but when you use words like cyanide, arsenic and sulfur, the man or woman becomes alarmed about that, and I want to raise their comfort level.”
So, as EQ cleans up and makes preparations to rebuild, the Town Council is searching for a way to boot them off Investment Boulevard. The town attorney is scheduled to brief the council Tuesday on their regulatory options.
If that effort is a dead end, council member Sutton said he might consider paying EQ not to rebuild.
“I’d rather they locate someplace else,” he said. “No question about it.”