On Wednesday, July 12, 2006 at 1:55 p.m., 11 companies of Los Angeles firefighters, two LAFD rescue ambulances, one hazardous materials squad, one EMS battalion captain, two battalion chief officer command teams and one division chief officer command team under the direction of Assistant Chief Michael Fulmis responded to a hazardous materials investigation at 3411 East 15th Street in Boyle Heights.
Los Angeles firefighters arrived quickly at an industrial coatings firm to discover an orderly self-evacuation of less than a dozen persons after a vat began producing vapors.
Firefighters immediately established a perimeter and an uphill/upwind command post as well as a staging location as the one-story building’s former occupants were all accounted for and assured to be uninjured.
According to staff at surface protection industries, their employees had earlier placed a combination of nitrocellulose and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether in an approximately four-foot-tall by four-foot-diameter mixing tank, and as in the past, placed a cover over the approximately 100 gallon mixture as they departed the immediate area for a break.
Unlike earlier occassions, they returned after approximately one-half hour to discover smoke and vapors emanating from the tank and called 9-1-1.
LAFD Haz-Mat experts in full protective gear utilized sophisticated instruments, including thermal imaging cameras, to determine that portions of the mixing tank were indeed producing heat as well as vapors.
After brief consultation with the firm’s onsite technical staff regarding the atypical product behavior, firefighters commenced indirect cooling measures to the outside lower portions of the tank in an effort to lessen the vapor and stabilize the product.
After careful analysis, the indirect method was seen to offer suboptimal results, and secondary measures - already prepared, were soon enacted by firefighters.
Taking profound care to contain any runoff, the tank’s cover was removed as water was directly introduced into to tank, cooling the mixture and abating the vapors.
Those efforts successful, the site was returned hours later to the control of surface protection industries, with the stipulation for a continuous fire watch pending the arrival of a private hazardous materials removal and remediation firm.
There were no civilian or firefighter injuries reported. The county of Los Angeles Fire Department’s Health Hazardous Materials Division was to handle the incident to conclusion.