Public not notified of 50,000-gallon toxic spill
On March 25, a 50,000-gallon tank holding toxic water as caustic as lye exploded in South Seattle.
Seems like a pretty big event, right? Only you haven't heard of it until now because no one bothered to tell the public. And it's not because the problem was under control:
It looked like a tornado hit the thing. It didn't just collapse -- it blew up the back of the building," said Peggy Rice, a King County industrial waste inspector. "It looked like a natural disaster had hit.
It wasn't a natural disaster that cause the spill, but the contents of what came out of the exploded tank threaten to create another kind of disaster:
Most of the waste was caught behind berms around the facility. But thousands of gallons are thought to have escaped to the bay or gone down the sewer to the county's wastewater treatment plant, said the company's owner, Marc Wislen.
Thousands of gallons of water as caustic as lye is no small problem. But the biggest problem associated with this situation is how all parties involved handled the situation. The owner of the company that operated the tanks did not contact authorities until the following day, failed to report the possibility of any of the toxic material reaching sewage pipes, and had been illegally storing different chemicals in the tank.
"What was in the demolished tank?
Good question.
It was highly caustic. King County inspectors' testing showed it also contained cadmium, which is toxic; as well as copper, which is toxic to salmon; and nickel, another byproduct of the metal plating business.
The Department of Ecology was not even notified of the explosion until three days later, so it released no official statement, despite the fact that the spill was one of the biggest in state history and the largest this decade.
Peggy Rice of the King County Industrial Waster Inspectors office will be handing out citations for the laws that were broken.
My only question is, who's handing out citations to the King County government, who handled this situation so egregiously? The excuse of "we didn't know" doesn't work on this one. Let's hope no further damage is caused by this spill.
