So it appears that someone took some potshots at a railcar full of toxic chemicals, resulting in the evacuation of some 8,000 people (at least, according to my Mom’s report) from businesses and homes in the area.
According to KSL News, “The chemicals involved are hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid and nitric acid.”
Now wait a second… didn’t we play with reasonably-large quantities of this stuff in high school chemistry class? I mean, not a railcar’s-worth, but plenty enough to pose a danger if we weren’t wearing safety equipment. Obviously, several tons of this toxic soup spilling from the side of a railcar in the middle of a metropolitan is a different story, but wow, it shut down a lot of roads.
And we’re just about to head to Grandma’s house, which requires us to go right past the area. Time to find an alternate route, I guess 🙂
What’s the largest non-lethal disaster you’ve had in your area in recent memory? I think this will be the biggest news in Salt Lake City since the tornado hit downtown several years ago. Or maybe the Olympics, though those were kind of a snoozer. But a disaster, nonetheless.
Mercury
–Another thing we used to play with in high school was Mercury. Well no longer. I know that last year D.C. shchools wiped all mercury usage out of schools. Probably due to things like this. For the past two weeks two differnt area schools had to shut down completly. As soon as one was reopened another had to close. Men in cheical suits came swooping in. Unknown to authourities how the students got ahold of the Mercury but they did. And to think that we all used to put this in our mouth’s when we were already sick. Teresa the Flautist and fire dancer
Vermiculite
If you’ve read “A Civil Action” (do NOT see the movie, the book is incredible) then you know that a bad company dumped a bunch of poision into some water aquifers in Mass. which eventually killed people. Here in Northern Minneapolis, the same company is now believed to have dumped Vermiculite into the area. A bunch of people here are circling the legal wagons to file another civil action. The company also got national news recently for suspected vermiculite dumping by their Montana coal stations.
cnn
So we made the front page at CNN.com with this news. They pin the number evacuated as 6,000 rather than 8,000, and focus on the fact that the chemicals coming out of the rail car were definitely not those listed on the manifest.
I suspect this may become much larger news. I expect that Governor Huntsman will raise a stink because Phillips Environmental apparently makes it a practice of commingling industrial wastes in unknown concentrations; the stuff spilling out of the railcar bore little resemblance to what it supposedly was carrying. They had trouble neutralizing the toxic waste because they were unsure what it was, and it appeared to be much stronger than the ostensible “10% concentration” as stated by company officials.
The most worrying thing at this point is that, out of a 13,000 gallon tanker, only 6,000 gallongs were recovered.
That means some 6000 to 7000 gallons of, apparently, a highly-concentrated toxic soup of phosphoric, acetic, sulfuric and hydrofluoric acids, combined with ammonia, just leaked into the public aquifer.
Mmm, exciting. A little extra spice in my drinking water.
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Matthew P. Barnson