CENtral Science

Friday round-up

Chemical health and safety news from the past week:

• Starting in the blogosphere: The Pump Handle says OSHA must wash its hands of permissible exposure limits, comments at ChemBark address whether a first year grad student really wants to initiate a chemical inventory
• From the NYT’s At War blog: Protecting the eyes that face explosions, on military personal protective equipment; “Today Corporal Sayre can see as well as he did before the bomb exploded beside him. He wears no corrective lenses. How can that be so? Because the heat and shrapnel that opened his face did not reach his eyes.” (And for the chemist working with liquids, goggles are better than safety glasses.)
• 2020 Science on Nanoparticle toxicity dropped from the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report, replaced with “threats from new technologies”
• Hungary’s red mud catastrophe packs a punch on plants, but it’s sodium that’s the problem, not trace metals or radioactive elements
• Very high levels of lead found in fields close to the site of the Chemie-Pack Nederland fire in the Netherlands last week; there are also allegations that the company “repeatedly flaunted environmental and fire safety regulations”
• EPA issues guidance for enhanced monitoring of hexavalent chromium in drinking water
• Study by largest hazardous waste dump in the West shows chemicals at safe level; $800,000 study showed “the level of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, surrounding the California dump was similar to contamination found in rural areas across the country, even in the remote wilderness.” So what else is causing birth defects in a nearby community?
• John Morrell Co., the INEOS ABS Public Advisory Group and two scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment received awards from the Greater Cincinnati area Alliance for Chemical Safety for risk reduction and communication
• SF-area salami plant to pay $850,000 for ammonia leak; “Seventeen people were hospitalized and 30 others sought medical attention after built-up pressure caused a pipe at the plant to burst and sent 200 pounds of anhydrous ammonia into the air on Aug. 28″
• Georgia Gulf Chemicals & Vinyls fined $55,000 for safety and health violations; “OSHA’s Baton Rouge Area Office initiated its investigation on July 20 after an OSHA inspector observed violations by Georgia Gulf Chemicals employees while conducting an investigation of a different company contracted to do maintenance work inside the same Plaquemine facility”
• Maker of Mace spray will plead guilty in Vermont hazmat case; $100,000 in fines for storing hazardous waste without a permit and $785,000 in clean-up costs
• Chemtura strikes settlement deal over Bio-Lab fire; this involves a fire in 2004 at a swimming pool chemicals plant that took two days to contain and “created a noxious cloud of smoke that stretched over east Georgia”; Chemtura will put $7 million into a settlement fund for affected residents, property owners, and businesses

Fires and explosions:

• An explosion at Arson Chemicals (yes, really) in India, “in one of the vessels where some chemical process at high temperature and pressure was under progress”; one killed and 12 others injured, including six fire fighters
• An explosion from a chemical drum outside a printing press in India; the drum heated up when six children and a security guard were burning waste material nearby to keep warm
• A fire led to some sort of explosion at a LyondellBasell plant in France; no one was injured; at the same port as the Gazechim fire last week
• An explosion from some sort of acid mixed with bleach at Sea Crest Linen Supply in New York; no serious injuries reported
• An explosion at Michigan’s Duratech Systems, which provides tank-lining services; workers were reportedly cleaning out storage tanks but no one was injured
• A fire gutted a chemical lab at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, possibly due to an electric short circuit; “According to reports, solvents like methanol, ethanol and acetene were stored in drums in the lab”; no one was injured

Leaks, spills, and other exposures:

• Spill avoided: Vessel laden with sulfuric acid sinks in Germany on the Rhine River; another story says that “The barge has a stainless steel double-hull designed to prevent its storage tanks from rupturing in case of an accident”
• Copper plating solution, 50-60 gal, at Church Technology in California
• Some sort of halomethane when a halon fire extinguishing system was triggered in a false alarm at a police dispatch center in Texas
• Chlorine into a creek in Australia from a mechanical failure at a water treatment plant; “swimming and fishing [have] been banned as a precaution”
• Ammonia from Washington Cold Storage in Washington state, investigators suspect that thieves, possibly “old-school methamphetamine cookers,” uncapped a valve; from Mahle Engineering Systems in the U.K., resulting in residential evacuations and a shelter-in-place order
• Ethylene oxide at a VA center in Washington state; the chemical is used to sterilize medical equipment and the automatic alarm and ventilation response system worked just fine
• Hydrogen cyanide and sulfurous acid gas in a building in Japan
• Xylene, a bottle, at a high school in Ohio
• Mercury, spilled from luggage in Miami International Airport; the story doesn’t say how much but I’m going to guess that it falls outside of the FAA’s exception for “small mercury thermometers” (pdf) in its hazardous materials rules
• Bromadiolone, and anticoagulant rat poison, which some San Francisco middle school students mistook for candy (coincidentally, I have a story of my own out this week on rat poison)
• A cop and an emergency medical technician were sickened after contact with a man believed to have smoked a PCP-laced cigarette; the ambulance had to be decontaminated, too
• Some stray dogs in Illinois have mysterious chemical burns
• On roads and railways: calcium carbide, toluene, something in a weed sprayer, a highly flammable and toxic fluid used in the rubber industry, hydrochloric acid, butane (“a valve had vibrated itself open on transit”), and milk (Hazmat crews had to keep it from contaminating a local reservoir, because supposedly bacteria from milk can be hazardous if it gets into drinking water. But why would said bacteria be any worse than what would normally contaminate an open reservoir?)