Brookhaven gas spill clean-up could take months
BROOKHAVEN » Wednesday was graduation day for the kindergarteners of Coebourn Elementary School. But instead of crossing the stage at their school, the ceremony was held at the borough municipal building after their school building was closed by the massive fuel spill at the Gas-NGo station at 4612 Edgmont Ave. last weekend.
Gas fumes still hung in the air as a tree company felled a number of large trees behind the station and, at the same time, two fuel trucks began removing the remaining fuel in tanks at the gas station.
“It’s on-going. They have to get in and remove some trees to get in and excavate more soil. That process is on-going.” said Rob Montella, Brookhaven fire chief. “They are pulling the fuel out of the tanks because of the excavation we are doing later on. We don’t want anything to happen - we want to make it safe. The game plan is to shore the edge of the tanks and then go in with some excavating to try to get this area cleaned up.”
Montella said environmental companies will drill test sites around the school building in the coming days to see what impact the spill had on the soil around the building. They’ve been continuing monitoring the school for vapor.
“It’s going to be a process - clean this up, get sheeting and shoring in there, secure the tanks, get the product out of the tanks and then these guys will go in and sample (for contamination) and hopefully we can get this area cleaned up,” Montella said.
Steve Schultz, emergency management coordinator for the borough, said the work could take months to complete.
“The initial phase of the clean-up, speaking with Lewis Environmental (the company handling the clean-up) is going extremely well, as far as the one retention basin. They removed shrubbery behind the gas station so they can start doing a soil assessment, testing, to see how much they will have to remove,” Schultz said. “The testing will determine how deeply they need to go.”
He said they will remove as few trees as possible; those trees that do come down were either contaminated or had to be removed to do the soil work.
The borough is also waiting for results from a smoke test of the sanitary sewers done on Monday, which will determine if anything got into that system, Schultz said.
On the other side of the school, crews from Lewis Environmental were moving an excavator into the retention pond to assess the extent of contamination.
Watching that operation was Caitlin Binck, who lives nearby and whose children liked to explore nature in the pond and Coebourn stream.
“We pass through these woods every day and we want to help,” Binck said. “Our community will do anything and everything to get this back to the way it was.”
Binck said her son Greyson, 6, just graduated from kindergarten and in the past had brought a snake from the pond into school for students to see.
“He was very upset (about the spill),” Binck said. “We went out looking for animals and he said, ‘Mommy, we’re not seeing anything.’ We go for walks every single night and have not seen one living animal since Saturday. We’re devastated that we’re not seeing anything, nothing.”
Binck said they had seen numerous dead frogs, turtles and fish, as well as a dead fox, on Saturday.
“This is devastating and it should have been prevented,” she said. She also said while she was not an expert, she felt the cleanup had seemed to be going slow.
“I’ve never had to see this or deal with this, but I feel it’s slow,”” she said. “Why don’t they have more people out here?”
Joe Roberts, senior project manager with Aquaterra Technologies Inc., which is working with Lewis Environmental, told Binck they are working as quickly as possible.
He said the worst of the soil damage was behind the gas station where the fuel flowed over that soil, and in some spots it had penetrated into loosely compacted soil and that required more testing and excavation. The stream should clean out as water flows, and experts were hoping for more rain to continue to remove containments trapped around rocks and sediment. These contaminants will then be captured by booms placed along the streams in numerous locations.
Crews will start walking the creek and retention pond to dislodge fuel that is settling against rocks. He was less concerned about the trees downstream and said the hardest cleanup will be the catchment basin.
Montella said they’ve been monitoring the schools for vapor the entire time of the incident, but no levels have been found.
Schultz said the cause is still under investigation and had nothing new to report on that.
The spill began late Friday. Although an overflow alarm was set off, first responders didn’t get a call until 6:15 Saturday morning and that came from a resident some distance away on Brookhaven Road reporting an odor of gas.
Firefighters quickly tracked the smell back to the Gas-N-Go station. They also found much of the fuel ponding in the retention basin on the other side of the elementary school.
On Sunday, county District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer visited the spill and on Monday said his office’s investigation is in a very preliminary stage and is ongoing.