CSB Meeting Includes Freedom Spill Update

The Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) published a meeting notice in today’s Federal Register (79 FR 34282-34283) for a public meeting concerning two separate chemical incidents in West Virginia; the explosion and fire which occurred at AL Solutions located in New Cumberland, WV on December 9^th, 2010, and the tank leak at Freedom Industries that contaminated the local water supply leaving hundreds of thousands of West Virginia residents without clean drinking water earlier this year. The meeting will be held in Charleston, WV on July 16^th, 2014.

The primary purpose of the meeting is to receive the staff report and recommendations on the titanium dust explosion. After receiving public comments following the staff report the Board typically votes on accepting those findings and recommendations.

The information on the Freedom spill will be an update on the Board’s investigation to date. No recommendations are expected to be presented or adopted at this meeting.

The meeting is open to the public and no registration is required.

Screening for Toxic Chemicals

Ken Ward, as usual, had a very interesting article at WVGazette.com this weekend about the continued controversy over what constitutes a ‘safe level’ of Crude MCHM in the drinking water of Charleston, WV. The combination of politics, analytical chemistry and chemphobia is never a pretty picture and when you add in drinking water safety you have a perfect storm of controversy.

The CDC last week published a rather detailed technical discussion of how they came, a second time, to set the safe drinking water limits at 1 ppm. There is also a rather detailed, and even more technical, page of information about 4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol, a major constituent of Crude MCHM, available from the National Institute of Health.

There is a very legitimate debate about the methodology that the CDC employed when they established the 1 ppm safe drinking water limit. I happen to agree with their method, but there is more than a little element of judgment call involved and that certainly calls for a public discussion. Unfortunately, the CDC was pressed for an answer by many of the same people who are now questioning the decision.

The problem, was of course, that there was an ongoing problem with over 300,000 people not being able to bathe, wash their clothes or prepare food with the water in their municipal water system. There was a great deal of political pressure to come up with a safe drinking limit based upon limited evidence. Any way the CDC went; setting the current limit, setting a stricter limit, or calling for more information; would have been met with legitimate complaints.

This is not a decision that should be made when there are problems with a contaminated water system. This is process that should be clearly established by a public rule making process that allows for a complete discussion of all of the ramifications that affect the decision and the outcomes based upon that decision.

This is why I described a process in my alternative to S1961 by which there would be a standard method established for determining the safe level of a contaminant in drinking water and a requirement for minimum standards for toxicity testing for chemicals that are likely to contaminate drinking water.

While there is certainly a technical component for testing and limit setting discussion, it is mainly a political decision. Political discussions take time to resolve. They should not be made in the heat of the moment when people are in desperate straits; seeking an immediate answer to a complicated problem.

Finally, we have to acknowledge that there is no perfect answer to the question of what is a safe exposure level. There are just too many differences in each of our bodies for there to be a single answer. This is why there should be a government funded and run epidemiological study of every instance where a chemical like this gets into a public water supply. We know that hindsight is 20-20; but it is only clear when a detailed and dispassionate investigation is made.

It will only be through such studies that we will be able to refine the rules and standards by which we determine what are safe levels of contamination in public drinking water.

Committee Hearings – Week of 02-09-14

Again, the Senate and House are both in session and we are starting to see more congressional hearings being scheduled. This week we will be seeing four hearings that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog; a visit by the new DHS Secretary, rail transportation safety, a biosecurity hearing and a field hearing looking at the Freedom spill. I’m posting this a little earlier than normal because the field hearing is taking place on Monday.

Currently there are no bills scheduled for floor consideration in either house that would be of specific interest to readers of this blog. That could certainly change as the week progresses, particularly in the Senate where the schedule is not disclosed in advance for the ‘minor’ bills that will be considered.

Freedom Spill

The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure will be holding a field hearing on Monday in Charleston, WV looking at the Charleston, West Virginia Chemical Spill. The Committee web site has a pretty decent summary of the facts about the spill. There are nine witnesses scheduled including a number of local officials. Sen. Manchin (D,WV) is scheduled as is Dr. Moure-Eraso (CSB Chairman). The star witness (if he shows) will be Gary Southern, the President of Freedom Industries.

Bad news, no live web cast of this hearing. Nothing about a recorded web cast though.

Biosecurity

The Emergency Preparedness, Response and Communications Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a hearing looking at “Bioterrorism: Assessing the Threat”. Hopefully this will include a discussion about how bioterrorism preparedness programs will aid in preventing natural pandemics.

New DHS Secretary

Secretary Johnson will appear before a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday to discuss “the Secretary’s Vision for the Future – Challenges and Priorities”. Nothing major expected here, but it will be interesting to see what differences in focus we will see with the new Secretary.

Rail Safety

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will be holding a hearing Thursday looking at “Enhancing our Rail Safety: Current Challenges for Passenger and Freight Rail”. No witness list is available yet but the Committee hearing page notes that the hearing will include “discussion of recent high-profile rail accidents [presumably including various crude oil train wrecks], positive train control implementation, and other key safety challenges”.

Bills Introduced – 01-27-14

Yesterday there were 21 bills introduced in the House and Senate. One of those will be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

S 1961 Latest Title: A bill to protect surface water from contamination by chemical storage facilities, and for other purposes. Sponsor: Sen Manchin, Joe, III (D,WV) 

I wrote about this bill over a week ago after the initial press release from Sen. Manchin, but we will still have to wait for the bill to be published to see how it attempts to achieve its objectives. There is frequently a disconnect between what those press releases say and what the bill actually attempts to do.

NOTE: Rumors continue to abound about Rep. McCaul’s (R,TX) CFATS authorization bill, but it has not yet been introduced. I suspect that it is being further refined.

New Chemical in Freedom Spill

Ken Ward is reporting that there is an interesting new twist in the story about the recent Crude MCHM spill in Charleston, WV. In a news report yesterday he reports that Freedom Industries is now telling State and Federal investigators that they had added another chemical to the Crude MCHM in the tank that leaked into the Elk River. The chemical is being reported as ‘PPH’ which is probably Dowanol PPh Glycol Ether. It was apparently added at a rate of about 5%.

The water treatment facility, Ken is reporting, thinks that their treatment process would have removed this chemical from the local drinking water. Additional tests are on-going to determine if that is true.

Blending of various chemicals to improve product performance is not an unusual practice in the chemical industry. Typically the blended products are given new names to help differentiate their improved performance. Current hazard communication rules do require that product material safety data sheets have to list hazardous materials when they are more than 1% of the product composition. Dow states that the PPh (which is more than 99% Propylene glycol phenyl ether) is an OSHA hazardous material, so it looks like it should have been listed on the Freedom MSDS.

It does not appear, however, from any of the news reports that I have seen, that Freedom Industries has provided their own MSDS for the Crude MCHM that they sold; they were apparently using the Eastman MSDS that would not have included references to PPh.

The Dow toxicity testing, which appears to be more extensive than the Eastman toxicity testing for MCHM, would seem to indicate that the PPh was less toxic than the Crude MCHM, but it would have slightly different medical effects. Again, PPh is a relatively non-hazardous industrial chemical that was never intended to be used in processes that would lead to human ingestion.

NOTE: There is a brief reference in Ken’s article to National Guard testing of the water. An earlier news report from WCHS-TV indicated that the 34^th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team was providing laboratory support to the water treatment facility. According to a Virginia National Guard web site, other CST’s are also involved.

Freedom Spill - In a Perfect World What Should Have Happened, Part III

This is the third in a short series of posts about what probably should have happened in Charleston, WV a little over a week ago now when a spill of Crude MCHM shutdown the water supply of well over 100,000 people for most of a week. The earlier post (listed below) I described how the water company could have kept the water out of its system in a perfect world.

Freedom Spill - In a Perfect World What Should Have Happened, Part I

Freedom Spill - In a Perfect World What Should Have Happened, Part II

Even if the Freedom facility and the water treatment facility did not live in a perfect world, if communications had been perfect then the prolonged shutdown and the post-shutdown exposure anxiety could have been avoided in this instance. What would this perfect communication looked like.

Potential Hazards Identified

By all news reports, Freedom Industries had complied with all of its chemical notification requirements. It had filed it reports to State and local authorities about the bulk storage of Crude MCHM. As is typical for these reports, particularly for those chemicals not regulatorially (new word) identified as hazardous, the reports were briefly looked at and then filed.

If the State and local authorities had entered the chemical storage data into an appropriate georgraphical information system (GIS) application, they would have seen that there was just a short distance away a water treatment plant that could be affected in the event of a spill at the Freedom site that made it into the nearby river. While the State and local authorities can be forgiven for not knowing if this could have any specific impact to the treatment facility, they should have notified the facility of the type and quantity of any chemicals in bulk storage upstream of the facility.

If the water treatment facility had received advanced notification from State and local authorities, it could have determined in advance whether or not their routine treatment activities would remove the chemical from any water entering the facility. They also could have acquired the testing capability to detect the chemical in their inlet and output waters.

Leak Notifications

There is no CERCLA reporting requirement for Crude MCHM as it is not a hazardous chemical and thus does not have a federal ‘reportable quantity’. However, given the close proximity of the tank farm to the Elk River, as soon as the leak broached the containment wall there should have been notification to the Coast Guard’s National Response Center (NRC), the agency that is responsible for coordinating all chemical spill information.

One would like to think that the NRC had appropriate GIS programs in place to identify the location of the spill and immediately be aware of the downstream water treatment plant. Immediate notification could then have been made to the plant about the spill.

Assuming that the Elk River is flowing at a relatively gentle 3 mph and is a half-mile upstream of the water treatment plant’s intakes, it would have taken the about 20 minutes for the first traces of the Crude MCHM to reach the intakes. This makes it clear that any notifications would have to be made promptly and follow-up actions needed to be taken with dispatch to avoid contamination of the treatment facility equipment.

Community Notification

As soon as the water treatment facility became aware of an upstream spill of a chemical that they knew could not be removed by their treatment processes, plans would have been initiated for a shutdown of the water intake. These plans would have included notification to all customers (direct notification and notification via the media) that there would be an impending shortage of treated water. This would have allowed people to start taking measures to ensure that they had drinking water on hand for the time of the shutdown.

Communications According to Law

It currently appears that Freedom Industries made all of the chemical notifications, including spill notification (none), required by law. It appears that current reporting requirements (and follow-up planning requirements) do not address the special case of chemical spills upstream of the water intake of a water treatment facility.

It is readily apparent that the chemical notification and planning processes need to be revised to address this situation. In a future post in the series, I will propose what I think those changes should include.

Bankruptcy for Freedom Spill

There was a news report yesterday that the company that owns Freedom Industries (Chemstream Holdings, Inc) has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. This will limit the amount of money that anyone, including the State of West Virginia or the local governments, will be able to recover. Of course, even without this protection there is only so much blood you can squeeze from a small company.

Chemical Spill Prevention Legislation

It took over a week for a set of legislators to come up with a knee jerk reaction to the chemical spill and water system closure incident in Charleston, WV. Normally I wait for actual legislation to be published before commenting on it, but because of the publicity already being generated by this bill that can’t actually be introduced until the 27^th I think that it is fair game.

The trio of Senators, Manchin (D,WV), Rockefeller (D,WV) and Boxer (D,CA) have crafted legislation that they claim “will help protect Americans from chemical spills that threaten drinking water”. This is certainly a laudable intention and the two West Virginia legislators certainly have a strong political reason for responding to the Freedom spill in a timely manner.

Their press release indicates that the bill embraces four key principles:

1. Requiring regular state inspections of above-ground chemical storage facilities,
2. Requiring industry to develop state-approved emergency response plans that meet at least minimum guidelines established in this bill,
3. Allowing states to recoup costs incurred from responding to emergencies, and
4. Ensuring drinking water systems have the tools and information to respond to emergencies.

It is hard to argue with these principles as they all appear on their face to be reasonable responses to the latest chemical incident. While the devil is always in the details, and we won’t know those for at least a week (unless the Senators are willing to release at least a draft copy of their bill), there are some obvious pitfalls in putting these principles into regulatory practice.

State Inspections

The federal government usually gets into problems when it starts to tell the States what to do. We already have State enforcement of many of the federal chemical safety programs and the drinking water programs managed under the EPA are almost all enforced by State regulators. The reason for this is clear, no one in Congress wants to be responsible for paying for the huge number of inspectors and other regulatory staff that would be responsible for federal oversight of these regulations.

There is much to be said in favor of State enforcement over federal enforcement of environmental regulations. Local conditions will have a huge effect on what is important. The air pollution controls necessary in an overcrowded and physically confined space like the Los Angeles basin are completely different than those that would apply in Alaska. The surface water protection requirements for Florida will be much more extensive than those in Arizona. And the chemical storage safety requirements will be much more stringent along the Houston ship channel than on a Kansas wheat farm.

But, there is also a completely different political climate in each of the States that will affect how well the State can or will implement chemical safety requirements. One only has to look at the proactive chemical safety program in Contra Costa County, California and compare it to the much more hands-off approach of the Texas state programs. Those local responses are governed by the opinions and political activism of the local population. And that local population, through their elected representative, will govern how much money these various State agencies will be able to spend to implement a chemical safety program.

Emergency Response Plans

I have long advocated more extensive emergency planning requirements for chemical facilities. The current lack of standards ensures that the vast number of existing emergency response plans are inadequate at best, and mostly non-existent. The establishment for standards, provisions for training local planning organizations, and funding for the development and periodic exercising of emergency response plans is an absolute must for the most dangerous chemical storage facilities.

While the owners of chemical storage facilities have a critical part to play in any emergency planning process, they cannot be held responsible for the process. The vast bulk of the response effort in the event of an accidental or deliberate chemical release will fall on State and local response agencies. Those agencies cannot allow local industries to mandate what their actions will be in a chemical release scenario any more than local police departments can allow banks to dictate how they will respond to a bank robbery.

Industry can only (and absolutely should be) held responsible for the on-site response efforts and the prompt complete off-site notification of all chemical incidents that could potentially have consequences beyond the local fence line.

They clearly should have a role in the State and local emergency planning process. Information about the type, quantity and location of potentially hazardous chemicals can only come from facility owner-operators. The facility should also have more expertise in handling and exposure issues related to those chemicals. But, legislators are going to have to be extremely careful about how they establish requirements for the facility support of the emergency planning process. If they get too aggressive, they are going to drive many small businesses out of business.

Cost Recovery

The idea that State and local governments should be able to recover their emergency response costs is certainly a good idea. I’m sure that there are many provisions in current civil law that allow for such recovery actions. The big problem is that the civil actions that result from incidents like the Freedom spill or the West explosion quickly bankrupt small companies that are involved in such incidents. Adding State and local governments to that civil liability chain will only drive companies to bankruptcy faster and ensure that private citizens recover an even smaller part of their just injury compensation.

Drinking Water Protection

We all certainly need to be concerned that drinking water systems have the tools and information necessary to ensure that our drinking water is safe (a topic I discussed here). Having said that; we need to be extremely careful that we don’t try to make the local water treatment facility into something which it is not. There is no way that any water treatment facility is going to be able to afford the equipment and personnel required to be able to remove all potential contaminants from water. Nor is the local water company laboratory going to be able to detect all of the possible contaminants that could be found in the water. The local taxpayers will not, cannot, afford to fund a facility with capabilities of that scope.

The only reasonable way to design a local water treatment facility is to look at the water supply and its normal seasonable variations to determine what contaminants are typically found in that supply. The water treatment methodology must be designed to remove those contaminants down to well understood and quantified safe drinking levels. Inlet water testing must be able to confirm the variations in the concentration of those normal contaminants that would affect processing conditions. It must also be able to routinely detect the most dangerous chemicals that could possibly be found in the water supply, particularly those that would not be removed to safe levels by the routine water treatment process employed at that facility.

I do believe that a water treatment facility should have test methods available to detect all chemicals routinely stored in bulk upstream (for a reasonable distance) of any surface water intake. There should be periodic water testing done with those methods, mainly to ensure that the laboratory maintains their ability to conduct those tests. In the event of an upstream spill this would allow the facility to begin routine testing to detect the arrival of that material upstream of the intake far enough to allow the facility to take appropriate action before the material gets into the facility.

That would also demand that the facility operators have a clear understanding of what contaminants that their operating system is not capable of removing to safe levels. This also demands that safe levels are known. Any chemical which is not removed by the treatment system, or for which there is no safe level established, should not be allowed to enter the treatment facility.

Scope of the Problem

The one thing that the press release and provided fact sheet clearly do not address is the potential scope of the problem. Depending on how they define chemical storage facilities this could include hundreds of thousands of facilities. The initial CFATS top screen submissions came from over 40,000 facilities that only stored large quantities of a little more than 300 chemicals that might be the target of terrorist attack. 

The number of inspectors that is going to be required to visit each and every one of those facilities on a routine basis is going to be huge. It might be large enough to have a noticeable impact on unemployment numbers if there were qualified people available to fill the positions. The funding that is going to be required to staff and support those positions will be enormous.

The amount of time and effort necessary to develop the emergency response plans for all of those facilities is going to task local first response agencies that are already having problems funding actual responders. The Local Emergency Planning Committees are already tasked to complete these efforts but are not funded and are generally ineffective. Adding requirements to their plans by requiring specific drinking water protection plans will not make them more effective.

Wait and See

Again, I haven’t seen this proposed bill (and I am not sure that it is yet in its final introduction form), but I would be very surprised if the bill takes into account the limitations that I have discussed above. A rapid political response, such as this bill, to an incident is almost always ineffective at achieving its objectives and always produces unintended consequences.

The chemical industry is certainly going to oppose legislation that expands the scope of current regulations. Having said that though, Lawrence Sloan, the President of SOCMA made a very important point in a blog post on Friday; “What we need is greater accountability and adherence to existing regulations throughout the entire chemical supply chain.”

It would be more effective in the long run if legislation waited until the Chemical Safety Board completed their investigation and made their recommendations. But, Senators Manchin and Rockefeller had to have something in hand this week as they head back to West Virginia to talk to voters and supporters.

Freedom Spill - In a Perfect World What Should Have Happened, Part II

This is the second in a short series of posts about what probably should have happened in Charleston, WV a little over a week ago now when a spill of Crude MCHM shutdown the water supply of well over 100,000 people for most of a week. The earlier post (listed below) I described how the water company could have kept the water out of its system in a perfect world.

Freedom Spill - In a Perfect World What Should Have Happened, Part I

Of course, in a perfect world, the material never would have gotten into the Elk River in the first place. Let’s take a quick at what a perfect chemical company would have done to ensure that the product never would have made it into the river.

Materials of Construction

The first thing that anyone should look at when deciding to do bulk storage of any chemical is to determine what the proper materials of construction are to be used for the tank walls, the piping, the gaskets and various seals; all wetted surfaces. You don’t want materials that will react with the chemical or will be corroded by the chemical (actually the same thing, just with a slightly different focus). If the chemical acts as a corrosive to the material that is used to construct the tank then sooner or later there will be a hole in the tank.

The easiest way to determine the proper materials of construction would be to look it up in one of the standard industry references. Many common chemicals have listings of compatible materials on-line. For less common materials it may be as easy as contacting the manufacturer, particularly the larger ones with good engineering departments. The tried and true method, however, is coupon testing. You take a sample of the chemical and a sample (a coupon) of the material you want to use to make your storage tank. You put the coupon in the sample for a lengthy period of time. When the time is up you pull the coupon out and closely (with a microscope) examine the coupon for signs of pitting or corrosion. If you don’t find any such signs, you are good to go. If you do, try something else.

Freedom Industries bought their Elk River terminal with the tanks already in place. I don’t expect that you can find Crude MCHM in any of the on-line sources and their supplier (I’m not sure who their supplier is) may not have been able to tell them. With already existing tanks on site, I would suspect that there was no coupon testing done. Someone made their best educated guess and said that the Crude MCHM doesn’t look like it would be too corrosive, or maybe they didn’t even think about materials of construction. That will be one of the things that the CSB will be looking for in their investigation.

Preventive Maintenance Program

Even if you have done your job well in selecting your materials of construction, you still have to have a preventive maintenance (PM) program in place for any storage tank system. You have to have a routine set of inspections done to make sure that the tank and all of its attached piping are working the way they were designed.

One critical part of that PM program is the visual inspection of the interior walls of the tank for signs of corrosion or weakening. This means that the tank gets cleaned on a regular schedule (every 3 to 5 years, depending on what you are storing) and a trained inspector goes into the tank with a big flashlight and looks for signs of damage to the metal and the welds or other joints. Any signs of metal fatigue or corrosion call for a serious re-examination of the use of that tank for the storage of that chemical. Serious or significant signs of corrosion could cause the tank to be taken out of chemical service until it is repaired or replaced.

Another part of the PM program is less rigorous but just as important. Every time that employees work around a storage tank they should be trained to look at it and report anything out of the ordinary. In every leaking tank that I have ever observed, the leak always started out small. If a tank has to leak, you want to catch the leak before there is a puddle of the chemical on the ground; every pound on the ground is a pound that you can’t sell to your customers.

I have no idea when the last time that the Crude MCHM tank was tested. You can bet that the CSB will ask and ask for documentation. From the news reports and the size of the Crude MCHM spill I would be very surprised if anyone was reporting small leaks at Freedom Industries. The CSB inspectors doing their initial walk around of the site will certainly have been looking for signs of leaks on other tanks at the facility.

Containment Maintenance

As I have mentioned on a number of occasions any time you have an above ground tank farm, you have to have some way to keep potential spills from those tanks confined. Typically this means that an impermeable wall of some sort is constructed around the tank farm. The construction of this containment is not as simple as just putting up a brick or concrete wall. Where the walls come together with the floor of the tank farm (which should be an impermeable barrier in its own right to keep nasty stuff out of the ground water) provisions have to be made to seal the joint so that nothing leaks out.

Materials of construction are not nearly so important in a containment wall. You don’t expect the material to be left in contact with the wall for any long period of time. All spills should be promptly cleaned up so there shouldn’t be long enough contact with the wall/floor to cause a breach.

Preventive maintenance checks of containment dikes and walls are usually pretty simple and do not require extensive training. Most tank farms are open to the weather and fill up with water every time that it rains. The water should remain in the containment area until specific action is taken to remove it. If the maintenance folks are not complaining about having to drain the containment area after a heavy rain, you have a leaky containment area. The leaks are easy to find; just look for the small river running away from the wall. Even after the rain you’ll be able to find the dried creek bed.

Spill Control

Most spills should never make it to the containment wall much less into the nearby river. Again the vast majority of spills start out small. Facilities are required to have a spill control plan in place to prevent those small spills from becoming a big deal. Once the source of the spill and the hazards associated with it are identified employees should begin controlling the spill with a variety of tools and devices. The idea is to keep the spill confined to the smallest area possible so that cleanup is easier.

The other thing that is done quickly is to take steps to stop the flow of the material out of the storage tank. Again there are a variety of tools available to do this including patches and plugs that can even deal with relatively sizeable holes in the walls of tanks. I have personally seen a six inch hole in a tank plugged well before 5,000 gallons of product leaked from the tank.

The news reports that I have seen seem to indicate that there were no significant spill control efforts taken inside or outside of the containment wall until after the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) inspectors had actually gotten on site. At that point a Crude MCHM slick could already be seen on the Elk River.

Spill Detection

There are lots of ways to detect spills. For really dangerous toxic chemicals there are gas detectors that can detect the airborne component of the spill down to the parts per billion detection limit. For flammable chemicals there are detectors that can determine when there is a concentration of the chemical in the air that could be expected to explosively ignite. All of these detection schemes are expensive and only justifiable if there is some special risk for relatively small leaks.

Again, the most common way that leaks are detected in tank farms is individual employees seeing the evidence of the leak in the normal course of their duties. In this case, however, it seems that the odor of the product allowed WVDEP inspectors to find the leak based upon public odor complaints. It would seem unreasonable to assume that the folks that worked at the facility were not able to determine that there was a leak based upon the odor in the plant area.

A possible reason that the odor did not raise flags at the facility a week ago yesterday may have been that they had been living with the odor of a leak for some time. The human nervous system does a real good job of ignoring odors after a certain amount of time being exposed to the odor. This will be another item that the CSB will address in their investigation.

Next Installment

In the next installment in this series I will look at the communications issues associated with this spill and look at how they would have gone in a perfect world.

Freedom Spill - In a Perfect World What Should Have Happened, Part I

There has been a lot of finger pointing and hand wringing over last week’s spill of Crude MCHM and the shutdown of the water facility in Charleston, WV. While we are a long way from knowing all of the facts we probably know enough to describe what we would have liked to have happened in this situation.

To do this we will look at consequence and work back upstream (just a minor pun here) to the source of the problem and see what could have been done (in a perfect world) to prevent this problem from happening.

Prevent Crude MCHM from Entering Drinking Water System

The proximate cause of the shutdown of the municipal water system was that it had been come contaminated with Crude MCHM that entered the system through the river water intake. If that intake of contaminated water had been prevented there would have been no major news story and no significant discomfort to the people of the area.

Water Treatment

The whole point of having a water treatment plant is to take in contaminated water and make it clean. If we could just drink the river water without processing we could save lots of money. But, almost by definition, river water is contaminated with stuff and the treatment plant removes that stuff. The plant is designed to remove a specific range of stuff that is expected to come down the river, typically the standard animal and plant material (and their normal waste and decay products) that are found in and around rivers.

That treatment process in Charleston did not remove Crude MCHM from the water. There are probably thousands of chemicals that it would not have removed from the water. But, systems to remove everything from the water (okay, no system removes all contaminants from the water, but we are really talking about safe levels of contaminants here) are very expensive to construct and maintain. So you design a treatment system that will remove the chemicals that you reasonably expect to see in the water supply that you will be treating.

Water Testing

The second way that you prevent unwanted chemicals from getting into your drinking water is to stop taking in water when something is present that the treatment system cannot remove. There have been a number of news stories about communities downstream of Charleston that will be shutting down their intakes as the Crude MCHM approaches their water intakes. These communities have an advantage over Charleston; everybody and their grandmother has told them that the Crude MCHM is on the way. Nobody told the water treatment folks in Charleston.

If you don’t get told in advance of a contamination stream that you can’t clean up, you have to rely on inlet water testing to identify such contaminants. This requires two things; first a list of chemicals of concern and second a method to test for them. Now there is something like 80,000 registered chemicals in production/use in the United States (that is a number I have seen tossed around, it is probably not accurate but it is in the right ballpark for this discussion). It is unlikely that any treatment facility knows exactly which of those it can and cannot remove from the water, but again it is unlikely that all of those will head towards your water treatment facility.

Even if you did know (highly unlikely) there are not standard and accepted test methods for detecting each of those chemicals in trace amounts in water. For a very large percentage of them, there is not even a standard for determining what is an acceptable safe level.

The best that you can hope for as a treatment facility operator is to know what could be headed your way and be able to test for that. That means you have to know what is routinely found upstream of your facility, both at fixed facilities and in transportation.

But even then it is not necessarily possible to continuously test for all of those chemicals. Some tests are so complex and time consuming that they consume resources that would make a water system too expensive to operate if testing were done on a continuous or even routine basis. Those tests you only want to run if you have a reason to suspect that that particular contaminant is heading your way. So you have to know about spills and accidents upstream, the sooner the better.

The Perfect World Solution

Okay, for this point in the discussion what would be the perfect solution to the problems that we have identified to this point? Here is a nice start; each water treatment plant would:

• Understand the limits of its treatment process, particularly what chemicals (and at what concentrations) that it cannot remove from the water;

• Know which of those chemicals are found upstream of the treatment plant both at fixed sites and in transportation;

• Know what the safe levels are for those chemicals in the drinking water;

• Have water testing capabilities in place to test incoming water, down to below the safe drinking limits, for those chemicals routinely expected to be found upstream that cannot be removed from water by the current treatment process;

• Have, for those tests that it could not afford to continuously do, a method for determining when that chemical was introduced into the water upstream of the facility so that it could begin testing as the chemical approached the facility.

Obviously, we want to keep these chemicals out of the water in the first place, but we have to recognize that we do not live in perfect world and accidents will happen. Since those accidents are beyond the control of the water treatment facility owners the solutions noted above really should be in place to provide perfectly safe drinking water.

I’ll discuss in later posts what can be done in a perfect world to prevent those chemicals from getting into the water in the first place.

The Freedom Spill – Why?

While the folks directly affected by the spill are worried about where they are going to get their clothes washed and take a bath, the bigger question is why did this happen? Why did an industrial chemical get into a city water distribution system? The Chemical Safety Board is scheduled to have a team arrive tomorrow to start their investigation.

The investigation will probably take much less time than normal; investigating a leak where everything is still together is a lot easier than reconstructing explosions and fires. If there isn’t another conflict with DOJ on crime scene vs chemical incident scene investigation we should see something in a couple of months.

But, given the news reports that I’ve seen, access to Google Maps and a little knowledge of process chemistry I think I can piece together a pretty fair picture of what probably happened.

The Facility

Looking at the facility on Google Maps, it is clear that it is (as news reports have noted) that this is a chemical storage facility, not a chemical manufacturing facility. There are 10 large storage tanks clearly visible within the facility, three smaller tanks and a number of much smaller storage containers. The 13 identifiable tanks all appear to be within a brick wall that probably serves as the primary spill containment. The area encircled by the brick wall is certainly large enough to contain spills of all of the tanks at the facility.

It is also obvious that the facility is very close to the Elk River with not much more than a chain link fence separating it from the river’s high water mark. There appears to be a barge loading/unloading facility at the water’s edge. The rail line that can be seen along the eastern boundary of the facility is no longer connected to anything beyond the property.

There is a tank truck loading facility between the large tanks and the perimeter fence. Tank trucks come in the north gate at the facility, get loaded and depart through the south gate near the administrative building.

The Spill

At some time on Thursday morning a tank containing Crude MCHM started leaking. From news reports the leaking tank was a 48,000 gallon tank so it was one of the ten large tanks. Most facilities do not have leak detection equipment for their bulk storage tanks unless there is potential for catastrophic consequences and the Crude MCHM certainly does not fit into that category.

Most leak detection regimes rely on preventive maintenance programs to prevent large leaks and small leaks are typically detected by employees working in the vicinity of the storage tanks. With the Freedom Industries leak being as much as 5,000 gallons (about what an over-the-road chemical tank truck carries) this was a fairly large leak. It will be interesting to see what the CSB says about the source of the leak.

Containment Failure

The news report sited above says that the containment overflowed. That does not seem to be possible. The three foot brick wall around the tank farm should have been more than high enough to contain the entire contents of one of the tanks, much less 5,000 gallons.

Ken Ward reported that the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) has ordered Freedom to empty all of their tanks at the site because the containment was not adequate to hold a spill. I suspect that the brick wall has cracks in it near the foundation that would allow any pooling liquid to leak out. This would have been obvious to the facility maintenance team every time that it rained and water collected within the containment area.

No Spill Response

The third part of any spill containment plan also failed in this instance. Any time a major leak is detected in a tank farm, one of the things that has to be done immediately is to check to ensure that the spill is being contained by the containment barrier. Any leaks in that barrier need to be controlled with mobile spill control equipment. News reports indicate that the WVDEP inspectors saw no such efforts being made when they showed up at the site.

The Water Company Response

News reports from WSAZ indicated during the initial response on Thursday that the water company felt that their inlet treatment system would deal with the relatively low amount of contamination (I have seen figures of 41 ppm for this spill) in the river water used to feed the water treatment plant. This is certainly true for a wide variety of contaminants that such facilities typically see.

This is not a chemical that the water company is required to test for, so there was no method of identifying this chemical in their water readily available on site. There are literally tens of thousands of industrial chemicals and testing for their presence in water can be quite difficult for a well-equipped water testing laboratory. Very few water treatment facilities can afford such facilities and most rely on out-side labs for non-routine testing. On site labs only test for those chemicals identified by State and federal environmental regulations; Crude MCHM does not show up on those lists.

According to news stories water system samples were sent to an outside lab for analysis even though the treatment facility thought that their system would remove the chemical upon intake. When that proved not to be the case, the emergency ‘no contact’ order was issued even though there is no clear indication that there was (or was not for that matter) any hazard associated with the level of contamination in the system.

Emergency Planning

There have been the inevitable complaints about the lack of a plan to deal with this particular problem. Particularly in the wake of the West Fertilizer tragedy last summer questions have been asked about whether or not Freedom Industries had fulfilled their community notification responsibilities. Ken Ward reported yesterday that the appropriate Tier II forms had been submitted to State and local agencies.

So why wasn’t there a plan in place to deal with this? Why would there be? Emergency planning folks get flooded with Tier II documents, particularly in an area with a large chemical industry like this area in West Virginia. Local emergency planning committees (LEPC) required by EPA regulations are largely voluntary groups with little or no local funding and certainly no federal funding beyond the odd grant or two.

If there is any actual emergency response planning done by these committees (and the Federal government does not actually require any planning to take place otherwise they would be forced to pay for it) it will be concentrated on the most hazardous chemical facilities in the area. In the Charleston, WV area that would include places that make chemicals that will kill people at concentrations of MCHM seen in the current water supply or cause truly catastrophic explosions or fires.

And there is no requirement for anyone to talk to a local water treatment facility in any of this emergency planning. They are not an emergency response organization.

From responses that we have seen to other chemical incidents in the area, I suspect that the chemical response planning and training in the Charleston, WV area is probably some of the best in the country. It didn’t include a response to this type of incident, mainly because it was too low on the potential consequence ladder.

Safe Levels of MCHM Set

Ken Ward reports today that the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ASTDR), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had determined a ‘safe level’ of MCHM in drinking water, 1 ppm. This is a calculated value not a tested value. It is from an authoritative source so the local water company will be off the hook for any liability for potential injures from up to that level of contamination in the water supply once things are started back up.

I suspect that they will try to take the levels lower than that, just to be on the safe side. On the other hand, people are getting fed up about not being able to wash themselves or their clothes, and local businesses are being hurt by the necessary closures because of the lack of water. I’m sure the management of the water company is really happy to see this number.