Three days after a fire ripped through a hazardous waste storage facility in Apex, experts say they are still unsure as to the effect the blaze will have on the surrounding environment.
Officials from Apex and supporting government agencies have said they are still unsure about what chemicals were actually present in the Environmental Quality Company facility at the time of the blaze.
“We, as of yet, do not not have any specific information on the actual chemicals they were handling the day of the incident, but we expect we will get that information from the company,” Robert Hall, supervising investigator for the Chemical Safety Board, said at a Saturday press conference.
And that’s a problem that will prohibit an accurate assessment of the damage to the area, according to professor of air quality and environmental technology Viney Aneja.
“We can only do an assessment of the impact if we know what’s there,” he said. “Otherwise we’ll be on a fishing expedition for a heck of a long time.”
Aneja said environmental analysts will need to know two things before they can even begin to measure the fire’s impact: the types of chemicals and the amount of material released.
“On both accounts the company is somewhat not forthcoming,” he said.
Most of the complication comes from the fact that the facility serves as a short-term storage site for hazardous wastes.
According to its hazardous waste management permit, the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources authorizes the site to handle more than 500 different types of hazardous wastes. Because this material moves in and out quickly, Aneja said officials will rely on the companies records to assess the situation.
The nature of the fire has also caused problems for investigators.
“Any time you have a hazmat fire or chemical fire, the best thing you can do is let it burn,” Mark Haraway, Apex fire chief, said at a Saturday morning press conference. “What that does is take care of all the hazards, but it also takes care of any data collection because it’s all gone.”
Haraway told reporters at Saturday’s press conference it may take “several days or weeks” for investigators to identify all the materials.
Although Aneja said the comprehensive cleanup will “be very complicated and will come much later,” cleaning up the atmosphere will be relatively simple.
“Once it is out in the atmosphere, you let it go — atmosphere has this wonderful property of removing pollutants naturally,” he said. “The question is how far down will pollutants travel.”
And this is the question that makes the matter more problematic, he said.
“Once you go outside the bounds of the facility, life gets complicated,” he said.
Despite the setbacks, Aneja said there was one thing that worked out in the situation: the weather.
“The weather is very intimately linked to what was to come and what was happening,” he said. “The rainfall was a blessing.”
In addition to helping temper the blaze, Aneja said rainfall has the ability to dissolve pollutants in the air and take them out of it.
The northerly wind also moved the toxic plume away from larger population centers, like Raleigh.
“The weather helped us dodge a bullet,” he said.
Aneja said that according to the company’s permit, many of the authorized materials are mixtures of chlorinated solvents, which release chlorine when burned.
But chlorine might not be the only by-product of the blaze. The EPA allows companies to mix certain combinations of materials while storing them based on a system of coded categories, further complicating the question of the plant’s contents.
Aneja however, said the categories are there for practical economic reasons.
“They cannot possibly separate all that,” he said. “The code is not to mislead anyone.”
Although Aneja said he thinks the fire released large quantities of chemicals, the question now, is how large is large.
“My sense is that this is not a trivial facility,” he said.
Even more important than the issue of environmental impact, Aneja said it’s necessary investigators find the cause of the blaze and take steps to prevent it in the future.
“These are rare occurrences, but boy when they happen, the impacts are very profound,” Aneja said.