Photography by Andrew Lewis
Graphic by Ellen Cochran
On a spring day, just outside Hillsborough, North Carolina, a truck carried a mattress down Interstate 85. In a flash, the poorly strapped down mattress flew off the back of the truck and was promptly run over by a tractor-trailer behind it.
The cab caught on fire which quickly spread to the trailer that was carrying an unknown resin. Likely due to the properties of the resin, the trailer exploded in the middle of the road. Orange County emergency response teams arrived at the scene, but because it was unclear exactly what the truck was carrying, they did not know how to safely respond.
“One of them exploded and the other one was on fire,” Sarah Pickhardt, Orange County emergency management division chief, said. “All we knew was that there was a large quantity of that resin in it.”
The Regional Response Team was called, and a one-mile evacuation was ordered. The evacuation was a precautionary measure — without knowing exactly what the truck was carrying, the resin could have posed varying levels of danger from reactivity to water to a high level of toxicity.
Although disaster was averted on this spring day in 2020, emergencies with unknown hazardous materials are a challenge for emergency response teams throughout the country.
Every day, hundreds of tractor-trailers and freight trains carry tons of hazardous materials across North Carolina, through the state’s rural areas and largest cities. In the case of an accident — as in the Hillsborough incident — emergency response teams may not know what’s being transported.
“The threat of a hazmat transportation incident remains significant, with an average of at least two incidents per hour, or more than 50 per day, nationally,” Brent Fisher, assistant director of fire and emergency management for Nash County, said in an email.
The Emergency Planning Community Right-to-Know Act requires any facility in the United States that stores hazardous chemicals to report what they have. This database of materials is accessible to any person who requests that information, including state authorities.
The challenge comes from the exemptions to the act. Among other exception, the act only applies to chemicals kept at a single location, meaning chemicals that are traveling through the state do not have to be reported.
Because of this, information on hazardous materials being carried by train and truck through North Carolina is not collected for the use of emergency response teams. In cases like the truck and trailer fire outside of Hillsborough, emergency response has to rely on placards placed on trucks.
Truck drivers are required to have a hazmat endorsement to drive hazardous materials, and in the best-case scenario, the driver of the vehicle in an accident will be awake and aware enough to tell emergency response what they are hauling. If they are unable to do so, a big diamond placard on their truck should provide enough information. Colored boxes and symbols correspond to different properties of the material — if it is extremely flammable, dangerous when wet, poisonous, explosive and more.
“The thing that is tricky are the things that go unreported and (without placards),” Pickhardt said. “If something that doesn’t meet those quantities, something that doesn’t meet those thresholds, that really is where we’ve got a lot of challenges because we might not have any idea what that thing is, and that has happened before in our community.”
When the material cannot be identified, the Regional Response Team (RRT) has to be called in. North Carolina has seven teams, made up of specialized hazmat experts, housed in fire departments throughout the state.
RRT’s are notified when an incident exceeds local capabilities. If the chemical properties of the substance are such that there is a potential to harm humans, animals or the environment, the RRT will recommend emergency response.
This leads to a formal request for RRT response and notification of the incident to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. Once on scene, the team provides assistance until the incident is stabilized and then clears the area.
“Once the incident is mitigated, under North Carolina law, the spiller is responsible for the clean-up of the incident,” Fisher said. “Some transportation companies have pre-existing contracts with an environmental clean-up contractor.”
Without official documentation of what is traveling through the state, localities conduct Hazardous Materials Commodity Flow Studies. These studies identify what hazardous materials are traveling through roads, rails, pipelines, water and air transportation in a given geographic area.
While this information assists responders, vehicles may be transporting hazardous materials unrecorded. As communities are built up, there is a higher likelihood that homes will dot the length of major roads.
“The thing that really gives me a little heart burn, is we do have two major interstates running through the community, we’ve got (Interstate) 40, we’ve got (Interstate) 85,” Pickhardt said. “I would say that the majority of the hazmat that’s going through our county … is traveling through on commercial vehicles (and) commercial trucks.”
While the potential for danger is not negligible, there are things that emergency management does to be better prepared in the case of emergency — beyond attempting to track hazardous materials.
For instance, in 2010, Asheville Fire Department invited the HAZMAT teams from Charlotte, Fayetteville and Greensboro to the Norfolk Southern railyard to participate in three simulated emergencies involving the collision of a train carrying flammable fuel, based on real life data from a commodity flow study from the United States Department of Energy and a flow study from Norfolk Southern.
This exercise allowed teams to practice what to do in the situation of a liquid fuel spill, a pressurized fuel escape and evacuating injured rail personnel. Wesley Rogers, division chief of the Asheville Fire Department, said he is not aware of an exercise of this magnitude taking place since 2010.
Although emergency preparedness teams are not a new concept, Pickhardt said that recent incidents have reminded both response teams and community members of their importance.
“(East Palestine is) a really good and unfortunate case study of what we need to be preparing for, what we need to be training for,” she said.
One way that Pickhardt recommends citizens prepare for a hazardous material event is with an emergency preparedness kit. These kits are not just for natural disasters, but can be used in case of any emergency.
Orange County emergency supply kit checklist includes drinking water, non-perishable food, flashlights and first aid, as well as documents like an emergency contact list and important family documents.
The county also has an alert system that residents can sign up for to be notified in the case of an emergency.
“Everybody in a community should really be ready because hazardous materials don’t necessarily just travel down interstates,” Pickhardt said. “Our recommendation for the whole community is that they have a quick to go bag of everything that they might need — that’s the emergency preparedness kit that we typically talk about.”
