No, it's not a volcano. This is a fire at an old factory being used for chemical storage. Hope you didn't live downwind.
WEST VIRGINIA, rampant opioid crisis, environmental devastation from mountain top removal coal mining, under educated, under employed, underfunded social safety net. Look at West Virginia if you want a preview of what NOT MY pres drumpf/trump, NOT MY vp pence and the republican majority in congress want to do to the rest of America. Here is just another example of what lack of regulation and lack of regulation enforcement ( due to policies as well as budget cuts for responsible agencies by republican politicians) we can expect to see more of. From DailyKos and the Washington Post.....
WTF Just Happened in Parkersburg, West Virginia?
My Facebook news feed popped up a story about a fire at an old factory that was being used to store chemicals. (Yes, I know Facebook and Fake News, but….) The pictures and the allegations were enough to get me to check out other sources. From the 10/22/17 Parkersburg News & Sentinel:
PARKERSBURG — Smoke is expected to continue to billow for several days from the former shovel plant in south Parkersburg that caught fire early Saturday morning.Twenty departments from six counties — including the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Environmental Protection — responded to the Ames Plant on Camden Avenue where all that remains of the more-than-400,000 square foot facility is charred rubble......No injuries were reported, Stewart said. Plastic material was stored in the facility, owned by IEI Plastics, he said.
A followup story reports on WV Governor Jim Justice visiting the site of the fire 10/25/17, which was still smoldering at the time.
...There are not a lot of things known at this point about what was at the site and what the contaminants might be. There was a possibility the Wood County government would go bankrupt fighting this fire, which could have burned for 35-40 days if nothing was done, officials said.”Someone had to stand up and make a decision,” Justice said of approving the financial support so the contractor who specializes in fighting industrial fires could remain on the scene and bring in additional resources….
According to the report (with lots of photos) that got me looking at this initially,
...The warehouse used to be the Ames Factory (I think they made shovels there), but for years has been a dump for things that Dupont can't legally get rid of. The state doesn't know what was in there, but there is possibilities of any number of these products being stored there - PVC, Nylon, Carbon black, Titanium dioxide, Fiberglass, Maleic Anhydride TLV 0.1 ppm, Formaldehyde, PTFE (Teflon), Styrene, Acrylonitrile, Polybutylene Terephthalate, and/or Acrylic Sheet all of which are not good things when burned.Edit: Update from Reddit "There is also an underground storage tank from when it was ames that is full of trichloroethyene, lead, ethylbenzene, and toluene that is leaking. The fire suppression system for the warehouse failed last winter because one of the pipes froze and busted. They never had it fixed."
If there’s an attribution as to who is putting this information together, I haven’t been able to uncover it, so take the story as unconfirmed. Additional allegations however would suggest the company operating the warehouse is a shell company owned by Dupont, that the chemicals stored include materials that would be difficult/expensive to dispose of safely, that there were numerous safety violations and a near total lack of anything approaching safe storage. And, there are more places like this out there.
The News & Sentinel does have more on this that would seem to make those charges worth following up. Officials: MSDS not accurate at IEI warehouse
PARKERSBURG — Officials say material safety data sheets for the Intercontinental Export-Import Plastics warehouse on Camden Avenue, the former Ames shovel plant, are likely out of date and do not give an accurate view of what was stored in the building at the time of the fire.
An MSDS is information that is specific to the chemical it describes. It tells how to store it safely, how to handle it, what particular hazards are associated with it, and often comes with a graphic symbol that provides a visual short-hand summary. The different colors identify specific hazards, the number indicates how great the hazard, plus one diamond for special notes for a compound. [UPDATE: Here’s what OSHA has to say.]
For the Parkersburg plant, it’s not just that the MSDS sheets may have been out of date, it’s that there does not seem to be a full inventory of what was being stored — and it’s likely the local officials had no idea beforehand of what was going on inside the factory, else the situation would never have been allowed to develop in the first place. Which is kind of the point.
If this seems familiar, a similar scenario played out in Houston, Texas after Hurricane Harvey.
The French company that says its Houston-area chemical plant is spewing "noxious" smoke—and may explode—successfully pressed federal regulators to delay new regulations designed to improve safety procedures at chemical plants, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times.The rules, which were set to go into effect this year, were halted by the Trump administration after a furious lobbying campaign by plant owner Arkema and its affiliated trade association, the American Chemistry Council, which represents a chemical industry that has poured tens of millions of dollars into federal elections.
As is known, the plant did explode with consequences for first responders and the community.
The chemical industry is not your friend, nor is the Federal Government these days. If anyone has more information about what just happened in Parkersburg, or if you’re aware of a similar situation where you live or work, feel free to comment (unless you’ve been made to sign an NDA — handy things, those.) With Industry friend Scott Pruitt at the helm of the Environmental Profitizing Agency, stay tuned for more of the same. (He’s going to need more bodyguards.)
PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — West Virginia emergency officials say a warehouse fire that began last week is nearly out.
Lubeck Fire Chief Mark Stewart estimates that the fire in South Parkersburg is “90 percent” extinguished from ongoing efforts by firefighters.
The goal is to finish overnight Friday and Saturday, then monitor it for up to two days for possible flare-ups.
The 420,000-foot (130,000-meter) warehouse property where the fire broke out Saturday is owned by Columbia, Maryland-based Intercontinental Export Import Inc., which says on its website that it buys and sells an array of recycled plastics worldwide.
The Department of Environmental Protection has been measuring air quality around the site and was expected to post more results later.
The DEP ordered the company to provide a detailed inventory and properly dispose of debris.
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