Joshua Sebold
Staff Writer
11/4/2009                                                                            Firefighters respond to chemical spill

Three Sierra Pacific Industries employees and one explosives contractor were injured Monday, Nov. 2, when a chemical leak occurred at SPI’s co-generation plant in Quincy.
The victims were exposed to chlorine gas when a truck driver making a delivery for Sierra Chemical hooked up to the wrong tank.

There are two tanks at the drop-off point. Quincy Fire Chief Robbie Cassou reported they are clearly marked and identified in plain language and with a universal number system known to people who work with  chemicals.

When the driver put the wrong chemical in the wrong tank, he mixed 20-30 gallons of sodium hypochlorite, essentially bleach, with 200 gallons of hydrochloric acid, which caused a chemical reaction that gave off 30 pounds of chlorine gas and an undetermined amount of liquid sodium monoxide.
The impacted area at the co-generation plant includes two large towers; the reaction happened at the base of one of them.

The doors at the bottom of the plant were open at the time, which created a suction effect pulling the chlorine gas, which is actually heavier than air and would normally stay low to the ground, up into the tower and out the top.
People on the floors above were exposed to the chlorine gas. Cassou believed the victims were in either a second-story control room or on the fifth floor where clean-up work was being done, or possibly in both areas.

When chlorine gas contacts water it forms hydrochloric acid; the victims’ nasal passages, throats and lungs were burned and irritated by the reaction. Respiratory problems have been the only injuries reported.
Three victims were released later in the day, and one was held overnight but was in stable condition.
Cassou said the reporting of the incident was strange, as emergency responders weren’t aware of the situation until after the four victims showed up in the emergency room.

The fire chief said in a hazardous materials situation it was almost always better to have hospital personnel aware of the situation before the victims arrived on scene so detoxification measures could be set up outside the building.

Cassou said in this case emergency responders learned of the situation because Plumas County Patrol Sergeant Jerry Hendricks was at a Rotary meeting when several nurses were paged.
Hendricks reportedly called dispatch to learn about the incident and found no one at the mill had notified anyone about the leak.

The fire chief said Hendricks made that call at 12:55 p.m. He added that at 12:57 dispatch called the front desk at SPI and discovered the receptionist didn’t know about the incident.

Cassou said dispatch persisted in questioning about a potential incident, which caused the front desk to investigate and report one person being sent to the hospital.

After further prodding from dispatch, the receptionist reportedly pursued the issue further and confirmed four people had actually been sent to the hospital and the mill did in fact need help.

The fire department and Hazmat team were dispatched shortly after 1 p.m.

Howard Hughes, safety coordinator for SPI’s Quincy Division, evacuated the SPI property and gathered information. He arrived to brief emergency responders, who were staging outside the facility, a bit less than two hours after the incident began.

SPI spokesman Mark Pawlicki reported the chemical reaction began around 12:15 p.m.
He also said he was under the impression someone at the mill called the sheriff’s office, but he wasn’t sure the sheriff’s office hadn’t called the mill.

Pawlicki said it only took the responders five minutes to get to the mill after contact was made and everyone was evacuated from the property before contact was made.

He added he didn’t know where any of the four victims were when exposed to the gas.
A press release by Hendricks indicated that a Hazmat incident “was reported” at SPI at 1:02 p.m. and that precautionary warnings were made on Carol Lane.

It also said that the state Office of Emergency Services was notified of the incident.
While waiting for a Sierra Chemical clean-up team, Quincy Fire Department and Plumas County Hazmat team, which shares many members, suited up in normal structural firefighting gear with oxygen tanks, and four members moved in to investigate the scene.

While preparing for this action, Cassou and Environmental Health Director Jerry Sipe discussed Hughes’ report.

Hughes had informed them there was 1,400 feet of detonation cord in the area of the fifth story of at least one of the towers, as blasting caps were being used with the cord to blow ashes and other residue off of the smokestack walls.

The co-generation plant wasn’t operating that day because of the clean-up work.
Pawlicki said the blasting work was done routinely about every six months.

Cassou and Sipe agreed the scenarios under which the explosives could be set off by this particular chemical reaction were relatively unlikely, although Cassou did comment later the materials were capable of creating a “sizable explosion” had they been set off.

He added there were more explosives in a truck outside owned by the company doing the blasting work and there were other chemicals in the co-generation plant and possibly in the chemical truck, making for a complicated situation, had a different accident occurred.

Sipe determined that even if the chlorine gas had dissipated, significant heat could cause the sodium monoxide to emit hazardous fumes as well.

He also said heat would be a good determinant of whether or not the reaction had ceased, as he and Cassou predicted it probably had at that point.

At this point Cassou and four other Hazmat members suited up and used a thermal imaging camera to determine that the reaction had completely ceased.

Moving into the co-generation plant, they used a Draeger-Tube to determine the concentration of chlorine gas in the area was down to two parts per million.

Cassou said regulations allowed someone to work for eight hours a day in a one-part-per-million concentration of chlorine gas, indicating it was relatively safe at that point.

The clean-up crew arrived shortly thereafter and the non-co-generation functions at the mill resumed at 5 p.m.

Pioneer Elementary School, located across the street from the SPI plant, dismissed students as scheduled at 1:30 p.m., but after-school activities were cancelled as a precaution.