Olin, Iowa-River Valley Co-op officials are scratching their heads over how a meth thief was able to release the valve on a 1,000-gallon anhydrous ammonia tank without opening the lock, resulting in the release of enough ammonia to send two passersby to the hospital for treatment. General Manager Tom Leiting told Green Markets there was so much going on after the incident around 6 a.m. July 11 that he and others at the co-op were not able to determine how the culprit got the valve cracked open on the tank with the lock still in place. “Our primary effort was to get the leak stopped, so we weren’t able to get any documentation or pictures,” Leiting said. He said the lock hadn’t been opened until his employees unlocked it to help firefighters finish closing the valve. He estimated that there was about 150 gallons in the tank at the time. The local press reported that two women driving by the co-op on Highway 30 thought they had encountered a fog bank instead of ammonia vapors, and were treated and released from the hospital at Anamosa. Coincidentally, the Olin break-in occurred about a week after Iowa officials held a ceremony in Des Moines to mark completion of installing 24,000 tank locks at farms and co-ops across the state under a program financed by federal funding. Lieting said the locks are in use at most all input dealers in Jones County and have been responsible for a “tremendous reduction” in the number of these incidents. A representative of the lock manufacturer that has supplied 50,000 of the locks in Iowa and elsewhere was quoted in the local press as saying he knows of only four or five cases in which thieves have tapped locked tanks. He said in a handful of cases the locks were not properly installed, which enabled thieves to get at the control valves.
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