‘Rare’ anhydrous incident causes N.D scare .

Lisbon, N.D.-Anhydrous ammonia thefts are down significantly in North Dakota because of controls over sales of cold medications, but Farmers Union Cooperative here got hit early Sunday, April 15 in what was probably the first such incident in a couple of years. Co-op officials said the thieves departed in a hurry, leaving the valve on the 1,000-gallon nurse tank open and causing the release of 350 gallons. “It’s the first theft that I know of since I’ve been here,” Agronomy Manager Dan Olson told Green Markets. “They used a hose and duct tape to siphon into an LP cylinder and when the pressure built up, it just blew the hose and the duct tape off,” Olson reported. “Apparently, at that point, they just took off running.” He said the police and fire departments got the valve closed and alerted residents, who were mostly asleep at the time, to stay inside and keep their windows shut as the vapor cloud drifted southeast. Olson said there were no evacuations, as reported in the local press, and calm was restored in about an hour and a half as the cloud drifted away. There was one report that a newspaper carrier out on his early rounds was treated at a hospital and released. No other injuries were reported. The only other loss was a large amount of produce at a nearby grocery store, where the heating system sucked in some of the fumes. Olson said the manager closed the store Sunday, threw out the produce, and washed down the floors, and then got the okay to reopen Monday. North Dakota has had restrictions on pseudoephredrine sales for two years, and Gary Wagner, registration coordinator in the fertilizer section of the state agriculture department, said anhydrous thefts are “not as common as they used to be.” Wagner didn’t have any statistics, but said the law “has been helping a lot as far as I can tell.”