Chemical Incident Reporting – Week of 10-12-24

NOTE: See here for series background.

Washington, NC – 9-18-24

Local News Reports: Here, here, and here.

Chlorine gas was released from a storage tank at a water treatment facility when an ammonium sulfate solution was inadvertently unloaded into a sodium hypochlorite storage tank by a delivery driver. The driver was taken to a local hospital for treatment. The remaining contents of the storage tank were hauled away for disposal as hazardous waste.

Possible CSB reportable if the driver was admitted to hospital. Possibly could be treated as a hazmat transportation incident.

A similar incident with unrelated water treatment chemicals occurred in May at a nearby water treatment plant in North Carolina.

These incidents are more common than most people realize. A gas cloud exiting a storage tank is an absolute signal that a mixing incident is occurring. Fast action shutting down the feed will minimize the potential damage and the size of the gas cloud. The problem is that frequently, the steam driven cloud (these reactions are often exothermic) frequently interferes with the driver (it is almost always a non-facility driver that is ‘responsible’ for such incidents) reaching the controls on the discharge line. This means that the cloud is larger and there is a danger of the storage tank physically failing due to the combination of overfilling and gas production.

NOTE: I missed this particular incident last month, but was pointed at it by a report at ISSSource.com.