ICBC reports thousands of claims after acid spills on highway in Trail

TRAIL — Thousands of insurance claims have been made after two acid spills along a southeastern B.C. highway earlier this year that damaged vehicles.

Insurance Corp. of B.C. spokeswoman Lindsay Wilkins said vehicle claims related to the April 10 and May 23 spills of sulphuric acid in Trail have topped 3,000.

“These are complex claims that require extra time to process as each vehicle may have been exposed to varying degrees of sulphuric acid, affecting different parts and components of the vehicle,” she said in an email statement.

A technical expert has been retained to determine the level of contamination of each vehicle and a team of 30 is dedicated to processing the claims.

Vancouver-based Teck Resources Ltd. said in a news release that the separate spills, one amounting to about 220 litres and the other of about 70 litres, occurred along as much as 16 kilometres of a busy commuter route through Trail.

The spills happened after Teck sold the acid from its Trail smelter and the buyer, International Raw Materials Ltd., contracted to move the corrosive liquid by truck to two other locations in the city.

The truck leaked the acid intermittently along the route, said Trail Mayor Mike Martin by telephone.

“I’ve seen numbers in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles per day that would be passing along that route in both directions,” he said, adding the number of southbound vehicles that could have splashed through the acid “would have been considerable.”