Clean Harbors fire forces evacuation Danger averted but investigation ongoing
A small fire broke out at Clean Harbors yesterday, necessitating an evacuation of the South Arkansas Community College East Campus and a response from the El Dorado Fire Department.
Phillip Retallick, Clean Harbors’ senior vice president for compliance and regulatory affairs, said the fire broke out spontaneously.
“It was pyrophoric. In other words, it could burn spontaneously in air,” Retallick said.
The Clean Harbors plant in El Dorado includes two incineration facilities, where industrial waste can be delivered for destruction. Sometimes that waste has to be transferred to smaller containers more suited for the facility’s kiln; for example, waste delivered in a 55-gallon drum may be transferred to a 30-gallon kiln ready container charge.
Retallick said today’s fire happened during a routine repacking. Employees followed their typical process for repacking waste into the kiln ready container charges when one container of waste spontaneously ignited.
“When the drum arrives—say it’s a 55-gallon drum—it’s upright. They took the bunghole cap off and they screwed on a plastic valve, and then we have what we call ‘drum tilters.’ They tilted the drum from vertical to horizontal and they opened the valve and they were filling the other container, and as that happened, there was a spontaneous ignition, combustion,” he said. “There was no explosion, there was just a fire.”
The waste repacking team immediately tried to extinguish the fire. The repacking room at Clean Harbors is equipped with emergency fire suppression tools including fire suppression foam and fire extinguishers.
When the team realized they were not going to be able to extinguish the fire on their own, they evacuated the building and alerted the El Dorado Fire Department, Retallick said. EFD’s hazardous materials team responded alongside Clean Harbors’ on-site fire brigade.
“Clean Harbors, their emergency response brigade did a good job, kept the fire contained to the building until we got there to help them put it out. Unfortunately, dealing with hazardous materials, there are incidences where we handle fires and releases, but they handled it pretty well out there,” El Dorado Fire Chief Chad Mosby said.
Mosby said an evacuation order was placed for the SouthArk East Campus since it was downwind of the smoke cloud caused by the chemical fire. There was also a shelter-in-place order placed for the neighborhood north of Clean Harbors. The Union County Jail was unaffected, Mosby said.
“We were downwind of the fire. There was some smoke coming off the building,” Retallick said. “As precaution, the Chief wanted a shelter-in-place for anyone in the northeast quadrant. … But then after the fire was put out and the situation was reassessed a couple of hours after the incident, the Chief issued an all-clear.”
Retallick said Clean Harbors has already initiated an investigation into the fire.
Every customer that delivers industrial waste to Clean Harbors for incineration must create a manifest listing the chemicals in their waste. The manifest on the waste
that caught fire yesterday listed heptane and small percentages of methylated compounds and phosphine.
Retallick said waste for incineration is not supposed to be pyrophoric. He said Clean Harbors is currently speaking with the customer that supplied the waste about the chemical profile submitted in their manifest.
“Right after we got the incident stabilized, we began a management team investigation to find out the root cause of the incident, so that operation is underway,” he said. “We’ll be doing some more additional follow up to understand why this incident occurred, the root cause of it and what corrective actions are going to be taken.”
He noted that Clean Harbors did perform air quality tests after the fire and found no worrying chemicals in amounts above normal background levels. He said that given what Clean Harbors knows so far, the probability is low that there will be a negative environmental impact as a result of the fire.
No injuries were sustained on-site. Damage was contained to the repacking room at Clean Harbors, and Retallick was not sure yesterday afternoon what the extent of the damage was.
The waste that caught fire is now isolated from other chemicals at the Clean Harbors facility. The EFD was called in for assistance at 10:43 a.m. yesterday, and by 2 p.m. SouthArk students had the all-clear to return to class.
“Public safety is our primary concern, as it was for the Clean Harbors folks,” Mosby said. “We took some preventative measures to try to make sure that people were not in harm’s way and fortunately we didn’t get any down rain on our monitors that would indicate there was any danger.”