Tuesday, January 28, 2014

10,000 gallons of chemicals spilled in West Virginia on Jan 9

According to news reports this morning Freedom Industries now believes that 10,000 gallons of chemicals leaked from that compromised tank on January 9th. Their initial estimate was 2,000 - 5,000 gallons and was upped to 7,500 gallons within days of the spill. Initial reports on the size of the tank holding the chemicals also varied and the numbers still don't seem to quite add up. 

As reported in the Charleston Daily Mail ...

Freedom told the DEP [West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection] it had 110,375 gallons of the two chemicals combined on Jan. 8 in three different tanks. After the spill the company moved the rest of the chemical to a location it owns in Nitro, called Poca Blending LLC.
As of Jan. 21 Freedom "measured" 100,233 gallons in six tanks at the Poca Blending site. 

"The difference between the value from the morning of Jan. 9 and the value from Jan. 21 is 10,142 gallons. We therefore estimate that approximately 10,000 gallons of MCHM/PPH blend was released the morning of Jan. 9," Freedom said in a response to a DEP order.


http://www.charlestondailymail.com/News/breakingnews/201401270107

This just fills your with confidence doesn't it - especially since the reported tank sizes for the three tanks on site that stored the MCHM/PPH mixture come to a smaller total than 100,000 gallons? Hummm.

Freedom Industries is under a DEP order to remove all of the chemicals from the storage facility by March 15th. There are 14 other tanks on the site that have been used to store thousands of gallons of different chemicals, though apparently it isn't clear how many gallons of what chemicals are currently on the site.

Aren't they even required to keep track of that sort of thing ?


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