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Contaminated soil is removed and new soil is placed along U.S. 29 in Madison County after a 7,000-gallon gasoline spill. |
Even before a tanker truck driver lost control of his rig and spilled nearly 7,000 gallons of gas onto U.S. 29 in Madison County, Matt Culwell was ready.
Culwell's employer, A&A Environmental Service in Stafford County, has a contract with the truck-line owner to respond if there's a spill. So Culwell and his co-workers were on the scene within hours of the Monday accident.
"They call and ask us to clean up their mess," said Culwell, A&A Environmental's operations manager. "It could be anything from a diesel fuel tank on a truck to a whole tanker load."
A&A Environmental, a division of US Liquids, is one of about a dozen environmental cleanup firms in Virginia. It handles about 200 such calls a year.
Most spills involve gas or oil, Culwell said. The two are similar in the way they are cleaned up, except that gas is more dangerous because it's highly flammable.
Because of confidentiality agreements, Culwell would not discuss details of the Madison spill, which has snarled traffic all week on the dual-lane highway.
But officials say the quick response by private companies, local firefighters and state agencies prevented a bad situation from becoming much worse.
And though there's no typical cleanup job, Culwell says this week's spill illustrates how the cleanup process works.
First, "I try to get a mental picture" of the scene, he said. For example, a call about a truck leak in a parking lot is fairly routine. "You typically pressure-wash the lot and vacuum it up," he said.
Vacuum trucks--similar to those used to empty septic tanks--safely suck gas and oil into sealed containers.
"If it gets into the soil, we dig it up with a Bobcat or a backhoe. If it's in a stream, we may put in a boat. Each scenario is different, and we have methods to handle it," Culwell said.
In Madison, gas first had to be vacuumed off the road and ditch. Then hundreds of tons of contaminated soil had to be removed. That work was completed only yesterday because the fuel had seeped more than 15 feet into the ground and under the roadbed.
A&A Environmental's response trucks are equipped with absorbents and materials to fix leaks. For example, Culwell said, "We buy a type of putty to plug holes."
Some jobs "are slam-dunk easy," he said, while others are far more involved. The firm has cleaned up black powder, ammunition, shock-sensitive explosives and volatile chemicals.
One of the company's biggest jobs ever was cleaning up an oil-pipeline rupture at the Chalk Point Power Plant in Maryland several years ago.
"We had probably 300 people working 24 hours a day on double shifts for two months," Culwell said.
The Madison spill could have been worse had it been in a more populated area. But the cleanup won't be cheap--it may run more than $200,000.
The driver lost control of his tanker around 9:45 a.m. about a mile north of Brightwood. When it overturned, each of the truck's five fuel compartments cracked, spilling all but a few thousand gallons of the 8,600-gallon load. The crumpled vehicle straddled the southbound lanes.
John Fray, a Madison volunteer fireman, was one of the first to arrive: He found a split in the tanker "four or five feet long."
"There was gas flowing out in three or four places in big streams," he said yesterday. "There was a puddle of gas 18 inches deep and about 20 feet long."
While firefighters sprayed flame-retardant foam on the pooling gas as a precaution, authorities cut electric service to the area to reduce the chance of an explosion.
The Virginia Department of Transportation dumped several loads of sand into a culvert to slow the flow of gas toward the northbound lands and a farm pond. Authorities evacuated several nearby homes.
The Madison fire department already had some specialized equipment packed and ready to use in just such an emergency. Most localities, including the ones in the Fredericksburg area, have similar trailers equipped to deal with toxic spills.
Police notified Sheetz of the spill, and Sheetz called A&A Environmental. The Virginia Department of Emergency Management notified the Department of Environmental Quality.
Patricia Greek, DEQ's pollution response coordinator, headed from her Northern Virginia office to Madison to monitor the cleanup.
"Right now, we're trying to get all the contaminated soil out of the way," Greek said yesterday.
She might have had dejà vu when she arrived: The spill was similar to, though smaller than, an accident three years ago in Fauquier County. A motorist cut off a Sheetz tanker, which overturned and spilled about 4,000 gallons of gas.
Because the Madison spill was much larger, the cleanup will go on for some time, Greek said. After the cleanup crew leaves and highway repairs are completed, the site will be monitored for possible contamination of nearby ponds, streams and wells. The DEQ monitored the Fauquier spill site until last year.
On a typical day, Greek gets several calls about spills in her region, which runs from Arlington to Louisa County.
Gasoline can be a serious problem if it seeps into groundwater, she said. If cleanup begins quickly, much of the potential damage can be eliminated.
Timing is critical, she said.
"The hardest ones for me are when they are called in way after the event," she said. "If you find out quickly, you have a better chance."
