(The following article by Ken Leiser was posted on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website on February 25.)
PALMYRA, Mo. — First came the early morning rap on the door. Then came the coughing, the burning eyes.
In the frantic moments that followed a May 17, 2003, hydrochloric acid spill on nearby U.S. Highway 61, Shorti Garner and her husband, Steve, woke their children and piled them into the family camper to flee their home.
“My kids – in blankets and all – I scooped them up,” Shorti Garner said.
There have been no lingering health effects in the Garner household since 2,500 gallons of hydrochloric acid spilled from an overturned tanker about a quarter-mile away that morning, although Garner no longer lets her children play in the creek that runs through the back yard.
It’s a scene that plays out more than once a day, on average, somewhere in the United States. Last year, there were at least 400 transportation accidents like the one in Palmyra in which releases of hazardous materials shut down major transport arteries, displaced people from their homes or businesses, or even resulted in deaths.
Nobody is immune from a possible knock on the door. Major transportation accidents happen in small towns and major cities – almost anywhere there’s an active freight line, highway, river or airstrip.
Just last month, four people died when a tractor-trailer loaded with gasoline plunged from a highway overpass onto Interstate 95 near Baltimore and burst into flames. The accident shut down the major traffic corridor for hours. One year ago in Tamaroa, Ill., about 1,000 people were evacuated for as long as four days after 21 train cars, some carrying toxic chemicals, derailed. Some burned.
“Somewhere in the United States, every day, you have truck wrecks with all kinds of stuff on it,” said Palmyra Fire Chief Chuck Hoehne, who was in charge of the emergency response to the hydrochloric acid spill in May.
“Train wrecks. You have barges. Airplanes, they are full of that stuff too.”
Although transport of spent nuclear fuel gets most of the media and law enforcement attention, more than 300 million shipments of hazardous materials crisscross the country each year, moving almost invisibly through communities on interstates, railroads and airplanes.
For many shipments – including tankers filled with the gasoline that fuels our cars, the chlorine used at water treatment plants, and anhydrous ammonia used in farming – often the only giveaway is the diamond-shaped placard that tells what class of dangerous material is inside.
How safely hazardous materials are shipped looms large in Illinois and Missouri, whose geographic locations and confluence of railroads, rivers and interstate highways pull in a significant share of dangerous cargo, transportation officials say.
The number of total spills and other reportable incidents involving hazardous material shipments reached 14,661 last year – roughly double the typical year in the late 1980s, according to preliminary counts by the Department of Transportation’s Research and Special Programs Administration.
That’s partly because there’s more hazardous cargo being shipped, but also because of stricter reporting requirements, a RSPA spokesman said. Reportable spills can be as small as a stain on a package or a puddle of fuel on a gas station parking lot after a tanker delivery.
“It’s everywhere,” said Alan Roberts, president of the Dangerous Goods Advisory Council. “This is what keeps the country running. The problem is that nobody wants it in their back yard.”
Roberts is also a former associate administrator for hazardous materials safety in the Research and Special Programs Administration. He said the statistics for shipping dangerous cargo show the industry “has an excellent record overall” for safety.
He said mishaps involving ordinary household items like skateboards, step ladders and bathtubs outnumber those involving shipments of dangerous cargo.
Few people besides the driver and the shipper probably knew how close the tanker truck filled with hydrochloric acid was to their back yards as it approached Palmyra the morning of May 17.
This stretch of U.S. Highway 61 is part of the Avenue of the Saints, a mostly north-south route between St. Louis and St. Paul, Minn., that has seen a steady growth in commercial truck traffic in recent years, including shipments of hazardous materials.
On that morning, a red 2003 International hauling a tank of hydrochloric acid was northbound on the four-lane rural highway. The driver told troopers he nodded off and lost control of his truck, which clipped a road sign and separated from the tanker trailer.
The damaged tanker came to rest in the scruffy, grass median near the Highway 168 exit.
Accident reports show that hundreds of gallons of acid spilled into a drainage ditch that dumps into the North River less than a mile away, leaving a trail of dead fish in its path.
When a vapor cloud formed, several families were evacuated.
“I freaked out,” said Shorti Garner, recalling the sight of a firefighter on the front porch of their three-bedroom home. She wondered if her house was on fire.
The firefighter explained that a truck had tipped over on the highway and the family should evacuate to a shelter in town.
So she and her husband began to wake up their two children and two foster children – ages 3 to 11. Before long, she noticed everyone was coughing. What alarmed her most was the way her son, Josh, was coughing.
She handed him a washcloth to put over his mouth. Not knowing what had spilled, Steve was scared to start the camper at first. But they drove to his brother’s house outside town and parked their camper in his driveway until it was safe to return.
The federal government regulates the flow of hazardous cargo across America mostly through rules on packaging, preparation and documentation. Shippers must be certified. Transport workers must be trained. Papers must be in order.
Truck driver Greg Pasterski of Wisconsin said he has been driving for 26 years and has never had a ticket or an accident. Pasterski said his company, Air Products, hires only safe drivers.
“If you have a bad record, you’re not getting a job,” he said, while walking around his trailer load of compressed liquid helium last month at a Highway 61 truck stop. Hauling hazardous cargo “is as safe as the operator wants to make it … and the company.”
His trucking company closely examines the trucks before they leave the yard, he said, but government inspectors occasionally have found minor problems out on the road. Mechanics usually “take care of it right away” when they return to the yard.
Still, in some corners of post-Sept. 11 America, environmentalists and community officials are pushing for tougher regulations because of the potential for sabotage or terrorism.
In 2002, Missouri Gov. Bob Holden signed a sweeping counterterrorism measure that, among other things, makes it a Class B misdemeanor for hazardous-materials trucks to enter a highway tunnel. That will only affect trucks using the future Lindbergh Boulevard tunnel beneath the new runway at Lambert Field.
Last month, the District of Columbia city council heard arguments for and against banning shipments of poisonous gases, explosives, and highly flammable gases in the nation’s capital, one of the cities considered a “high threat” target for terrorism. Fred Millar, a consultant working for Friends of the Earth on the issue, fears terrorists may attack one of the slow-moving shipments in the future.
“All we are trying to do is reroute the most dangerous targets,” Millar said. “Only the top most dangerous shipments.”
Millar said Washington is not the only city at risk. St. Louis and other population centers have shipments of dangerous cargo quietly rumbling through as well, and some would move to regulate them if they knew what they were up against.
“It is very clear that there are no regulations of the routing of hazardous materials by rail, and there is no law or regulation of what the cities or states can do to protect themselves from terrorism,” he said.
Federal regulations bar trucks carrying any amount of materials that are highly explosive, poisonous when inhaled or radioactive in heavily populated areas, tunnels or narrow alleys “whenever practical,” said David Longo of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
The rules also cover larger quantities of other types of dangerous materials, Longo said.
Millar said that regulation is “virtually never enforced.”
Roberts, however, said states are required to adopt and enforce the federal routing requirements in order to be eligible for certain highway safety funds.
Joe Delcambre, spokesman for the Department of Transportation’s Research and Special Programs Administration, defended the federal government’s regulation of hazardous materials shipments, saying safety is the “biggest concern.”
Total incidents have grown with the mounting volume of hazardous shipments, including those carried through burgeoning overnight-delivery companies like FedEx and United Parcel Service.
“Those guys really started to take off,” Delcambre said. “With an increase in business also came an increase in the number of hazardous material packages.”
But Delcambre added that the number of serious transportation mishaps leading to evacuations, highway closures or major injuries has remained fairly constant over the years.
Nearly two months after the acid spill on U.S. Highway 61, another more closely watched shipment passed through Marion County, about 14 miles south of Palmyra on the Norfolk Southern Railroad line.
In that instance, fire and police agencies throughout Marion and surrounding counties were given a near blow-by-blow account of how the shipment of 125 used nuclear fuel rod assemblies from West Valley, N.Y., was progressing as it passed safely.
Transportation routes are studied before nuclear shipments are made. The containers are designed to withstand enormous forces without releasing harmful doses of radiation. They’re escorted 24 hours a day, including armed guards near major population centers.
And they’re generally diverted onto beltways like Interstates 270 and 255 in St. Louis to bypass major urban areas.
Shipments of used nuclear fuel are far less commonplace than other potentially dangerous commodities, numbering a couple dozen a year lately, but they spark the most intense political firefights.
For instance, Holden ordered a three-truck convoy hauling nuclear waste to stop in the Metro East area for several hours in June 2001 before finally allowing it to enter Missouri after rush-hour traffic in St. Louis had dissipated.
With President George W. Bush’s administration pushing a nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the transportation issue isn’t expected to fade away.
John S. Hark, chairman of Marion County’s local emergency planning committee, said that clearly “somebody needed to be notifying somebody” when the latest highly radioactive load passed through Illinois and Missouri between July 13 and 17.
“Was there a little more hype than what was needed? Possibly so,” Hark said. “But there again, I’d rather there be a little more hype than nothing.”
Roberts of the Dangerous Goods Advisory Council said the regulatory safeguards that go into shipping high-level radioactive waste are “very intense.” The result? In decades of transporting high-level radioactive waste, he said, there has not been a recorded harmful release of radiation leading to injury or death.
Congress’ investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, has concluded that there is a low likelihood of widespread public harm in the event of a terrorist attack or a major accident involving spent nuclear fuel.
But Bob Halstead, a transportation consultant to the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said it’s right for the government to have tougher regulations on used nuclear fuel than any other dangerous chemicals.
Spent nuclear fuel is “immediately lethal” to those who come in direct contact with it, and small amounts of radiation even penetrate its shipment containers, he said. Cleaning up after a worst-case transportation accident could cost up to $10 billion.
“If someone says they have something more dangerous,” he said, “let them put it on the table.”
Does Halstead believe the rules for transporting other dangerous materials are up to snuff? “You bet I don’t,” he said.
He thinks it’s odd that the government doesn’t regulate gasoline or propane more strictly. Drivers should meet tougher training requirements, he said, and the government should take a closer look at routes.
A Post-Dispatch survey of fire departments in the St. Louis area showed that most don’t know exactly what is passing through their communities at any given time, although some wish they did.
Officials from 31 fire departments that participated said they realize hazardous materials routinely pass within a half-mile of homes, schools and shopping centers in their communities every day with little or no advance notice.
So many potentially dangerous shipments pass through the region that it would be impractical to alert departments ahead of time, as is done with radioactive materials, some acknowledged.
For fire agencies, that means training and planning for potential disasters involving dangerous chemical spills.
The O’Fallon, Mo., Fire Protection District is crisscrossed by highways and freight railroad tracks. Last year, the district gathered together several local leaders to discuss what would happen if the community were confronted by a railroad tank car leaking chlorine.
“You have many more instances of different chemicals causing you problems than you do radioactive materials,” said O’Fallon Chief Michael Ballmann.
“I mean, if you are a gambler, you would go on the odds – and the odds are (in favor of) something like a tractor-trailer or even a normal train derailment of chlorine gas or propane or whatever the case might be.”