Acid Spill In Pennsylvania: 5,000 Evacuated After Hazardous Spill

WIND GAP, Pa. — A tractor-trailer carrying a dangerous acid overturned on a highway Saturday, prompting authorities to order thousands of residents to leave the area for almost nine hours.

The tanker, carrying 33,000 pounds of corrosive hydrofluoric acid, a component for household detergents, flipped on a sloping curve in the road at about 3 a.m. on the edge of Wind Gap, about 60 miles north of Philadelphia, and began leaking slowly.

Hydrofluoric acid in low doses can irritate the eyes, nose and respiratory tract, and in higher doses it can cause severe burns, chronic lung disease or even death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

At 7 a.m., officials ordered an evacuation of 944 households. They said about 5,000 people were in the affected area.

Northampton County spokesman John Conklin said the truck driver was treated at a hospital and was released. One of about 200 people at an evacuation center at a local high school was taken to a hospital for a condition unrelated to the hazardous-materials incident.

Emergency crews reported liquid dripping from the tanker's valves or piping, forcing them to don full-protection suits to stop the drip. The tanker truck was righted at about 3 p.m., and the evacuation order was lifted soon after, although the road, Route 33, remained closed in both directions.

Conklin said animals in the affected area, including horses from several farms, were relocated.

Comments

[Bitsko]

UPDATE: 200,000 Hippies Arrive At Giant Acid Spill.

[t squared]

What about the animals that happen to live there and are not owned by people? What about the soil and water that will fall on it and flow through it?

Don't incite. Don't report.

[TJCole]

Wait till it's a truck full of containers of nuclear waste....

[slithers]

Your point?

[JoAnnCr]

The plan from the nuclear power industry is to transport radioactive waste to a central location in the United States. This transport would use rail, and highway routes.

The proposed central location is Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The continued research into this site did not get the funding in the Obama budget (already spent: $9 billion) and has consistently faltered due to opposition both to the questionable safety of transporting waste and the pressure to use safer, less expensive energy.

The chemical spill in Pennsylvania is nothing compared to a nuclear waste spill.

[JHancock]

I guess I should have read this story when I browsed the main page before we went out to dinner as they closed US 33 for several miles. Oh well it's all cleaned up now. Weird thing is since 33 is the only highway in that area, any evacuation (and the detour around 33) was via backed up secondary roads. It was a mess, but cudos to the PA State Police and to PennDOT for closing the road and cleaning up the mess so fast.

[plaidsportcoat]

oh. hmmm. I can't wait to buy some dishwashing detergent with hydrofluoric acid and play with bubbles with my little kids! yippee. FDA, etc = bankrupt

[pc51]

Those tanker truck drivers up here drive like drunken angry maniacs for the most part as it is.

[SpaghettyIrish]

It may seem that way to you, but more likely you drive stupidly around a vehicle that can't stop in less than 450 feet at highway speed, and can't brake while turning for curves.

[DoDaMan]

I live 2 miles from the accident site Jacobsburg Park area

The driver is covering his arse saying he missed a deer

there are no deer left around here

I know I hunt

he fell asleep

lots of confidence in the truckers ...eh !!!

[timer00]

The driver swerved to miss a deer (should have hit it but I am sure sometimes your reactions are off) .. that is why the truck overturned. The information is on other new sites that have more updated information on this story.

[Dynamohum]

Did anybody WITNESS him hitting the DEER? My guess is IT IS A LIE!! No Witness, a truck driver at 3am and he hit a deer in an area that doesn't have them?

[JHancock]

Doesn't have them? Are you kidding? They are everywhere in NEPA.

[BillMelater]

Glad to hear no one was seriously hurt!

[Dialogue]

With Federal Legislation mandating a total of seven hours of maximum work for employees driving 18 wheelers, in a 24 hour day, you would see accidents drop dramatically. As I understand it, employees behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer can sit behind the wheel 13 hours out of a 24 hour day. As an example, a truck driver starts at 6 am and runs until 6 pm, with one hour for lunch (that equals 11 hours of driving). At 6 pm, the truck is idled for ten hours, with the restart occurring at 4 am. The driver reaches 13 hours of driving in a 24 hour day at 6 am. This process is repeated day-after-day, sometimes for an entire month, before the driver is given any time off. In town drivers, that are not assigned to driving cross country, can find themselves working additional hours in the trucking companies warehouse, pulling and stacking freight. President Obama, someone at the federal level should look into the practice of putting "exhausted employees behind the wheel" of huge trucks.

[Sweeper23]

Maximum driving hours are now 11 in 24. After working 70 hours in eight days, a driver must take 34 hours off (known as a "restart."­). In practice--and, certainly in today's slow and slowing economy--multiple 11-hour driving days are unlikely (there's just not enough freight to keep drivers rolling like that).
If by "idled" you mean not moving, that is one thing. But more and more states have engine idling restrictions--you just can't run the engine when you're not moving. There are various state exceptions for weather: you can idle the engine to keep yourself warm in really cold weather or to run air conditioning in hot weather. Just think: it's illegal to leave children or pets in a hot car, but it's perfectly okay to force truck drivers to try to sleep or rest in a truck sleeper 100-degree weather without A/C. We're all up against and environmen­tal/safety wall here.

Since their inception in 1935, federal Hours of Service of Drivers have been problematic. Too much to go into here, but the rules have often forced drivers to drive when they are tired and to sleep--if you can call it that--when they are not. I've been there and done that. It sucks. Makes you, as we used to say, "legal but lethal."

[tothcarp]

I live in Easton just South of Wind Gap. It is a Gap in the Blue Mt., very curvy and steep. Just south by its intersection with 22 is considered to be the most heavily ticketed area in the country. PA has the most miles of paved roads of any state in the US. We have more than New England, NJ, and New York put together. Yeah the roads are bad, and the drivers are as well. We are a stones throw from NJ, and share their driving insanity.

[BillMelater]

PA also has many hills and I have noticed the entrance/exit ramps to the interstates tend to be very short.

[JHancock]

That is the truth mainly in Eastern PA. Building any highways has always been a problem here, since most land is built on or owned by someone, so to cut down on purchase costs, they tend to have very short merge lanes on onramps. In some places it's almost none.

[citizen625]

This hydrochloric acid is quite possibly being used in the food business to extract high fructose corn syrup. How many of you want this generally recognized as safe ingredient in your food?
The profit maximizing level of production isn't necessarily the best way of insuring the safety of the food supply. Ask all the people who ate salmonella tainted peanut butter. Monsanto, ConAgra, Kellogs don't want to provide full disclosure on what their food technologists do to maximize profits. Like shipping hydrochloric acid to their processing facilities.
Watch out for House bill 875 and Senate bill 425. The house bill was written by a Democratic Rep. DeLauro who's husband gets significant money from Monsanto for his business. Just because you might agree with most of their Democratic politics doesn't mean they are free from influence.
Demand food safety. And the best way to do that is to have numerous producers close to their markets, not multinational companies whose MBAs are as greedy as Wall Streeters.

[tothcarp]

Hydroflouric. Is night and day different, cannot be neutralized, eats glass, makes deadly fumes, and did I say it cant be neutralized.

[ParacelsusTheophrastus]

Yes. It says hydrofluoric acid in the article not hydrochloric. They forgot to say that it takes calcium right out of your bones. It doesn't burn right away like HCl so it sneaks up on you. But it can be neutralized but the fluoride ion is also deadly.

[hmargret]

Right on....SB 425 is POISON. Monsanto was unleased by the Clintons and NAFTA.
ah yes, Bill Clinton's left us a hangover.
High Fructose causes many of the major health problems in the US.Stop eating it, people!
read labels.

[Curbrunner]

.

Moving sixteen and a half tons of hydrofluoric acid at a time is insane.
Trucks shouldn't be allowed to carry anymore that 5-10% of the load this truck was transporting for the very reason this incident has exposed.
.

[BillMelater]

Actually, it is not insane and is very necessary from nearly every standpoint. Precautions are taken for hazardous materials transported by truck. In this case, they clearly worked as only a trickle escaped the tanker and no one was harmed. Accidents do happen.

[SpaghettyIrish]

So, you would want 10-20 times the number of trucks carrying this load out in public?

[jsarets]

Most of these accidents wouldn't happen if there were separate highways for commercial trucks. Car-only and truck-only traffic flows are generally safe and orderly, but the mixture of car and truck traffic promotes riskier shifting and passing behavior.

I moved to the SF bay area not too long ago, and I'd never really driven on local roads that carry a substantial volume of bicycle traffic. I kinda dig the bicycle culture, but the mixture of cars and bikes in the same right of way is both dangerous and aggravating for everyone involved.

Bicycles, like trucks, have different flow characteristics than cars. This creates a kind of turbulence in the traffic stream that increasing the probability of accidents.

[Lochmon]

We can't even afford necessary maintenance on the highway system we already have, much less building and maintaining a second system.

If you want the goods produced by an industrial society, we're going to have occasional problems like this. (And if you don't want them, many of your neighbors do.)

[KarenGeorgetown]

.... and how could we build three sets of roadways exactly?

[jsarets]

They could be inner and outer roadways in a single right-of-way. For example, portions of the New Jersey Turnpike have an inner roadway for cars only and an outer roadway for any traffic.

I'm not saying that we should necessarily implement this concept across the interstate system, or that it would be at all economical. All I'm saying is that it would be safer if we did. We can't afford to take every level of precaution. I totally understand that.

[TestAndVerify]

We do actually have a transportation system like this. The vehicles run on continuous steel rails and several tanker cars can be connected together to several large cars moved by diesel powered electric motors. Some might even call this the railroad. Yes, there are accidents here and there with freight trains, but their safety record with extremely toxic chemicals is probably better than semi trucks with tanker trailers. Or at least HF has been transported by rail in the past and a catastrophic accident on a rail line might be near fewer people. I'm still wondering why there was HF being transported in the first place. Fluorine can be more safely transported using less toxic compounds and mixtures.

Here is some of the fun one can expect with Hydrogen Fluoride (the name of the liquid alone) or Hydrofluoric Acid (when added to water):
http://www.airproducts.com/Responsibility/EHS/ProductSafety/ProductSafetyInformation/Safetygrams/safetygram29.htm
And also the Material Safety Data Sheet(MSDS)
https://apdirect.airproducts.com/MSDS/DisplayPDF.aspx?docid=63384

Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

[Sweeper23]

jsarets --

Can you cite any studies that back up your contention that "car and truck-only traffic flows are generally safe and orderly"?

If the "mixture of car and truck traffic promotes riskier shifting (what?) and passing behavior," who is "shifting riskier" (what the heck IS that?!) and who is passing "riskier"? You should look up the AAA study I referred to.

[jsarets]

No, I'm not aware of any studies. I'm drawing on my own driving experiences to put forth an untested hypothesis and a supporting analogy that appeals to intuition.

In your experience as a trucker, does it make sense to you that a truck-only roadway would be safer?

By shifting, I mean shifting lanes. On mixed-traffic highways, in my experience, car drivers have an occasional tendency to be overly aggressive in passing trucks.

The results of your study are as intuitive as my theory. It's primarily the cars that provoke the unsafe situations, and that causes problems for the trucks because they aren't as maneuverable.

I hope you didn't interpret my comment as blaming the trucks. That wasn't my point at all.

[UtahLiberal435]

As usual in these sorts of news stories, absolutely no mention is made of which company was transporting the materials, or where they were headed.