Othello, Wash.-Local school district officials now know that students and anhydrous ammonia don’t mix. The Othello School District is looking for a new elementary school site after being warned by emergency management and other agencies that the location they originally chose would be in the danger zone if an ammonia release occurred from any one of three nearby industrial plants that have some 200,000 pounds as part of their daily operations. “While I support the idea of building an additional elementary school, I cannot support the proposed location as it puts our community’s children in harms way,” Adams County Emergency Management Coordinator Jay Weis advised school officials. Gary Lebacken, chief of one of the Adams fire districts, also cautioned, “That school would have been next to our biggest industrial area. It had the potential for 500 elementary school children that couldn’t have provided self-evacuation.” Dwight Remick, the school district’s director of finance and operations, agreed, “There are a lot more chemicals being used close to the site than people realized.” Actually, Remick noted, that’s the purpose of the state environmental review process, which in this case provided information from several local agencies during the comment period about the amount of chemicals used by various businesses and processing plants in the immediate vicinity of the site under consideration. “It clearly demonstrated to me the reason for going through the SEPA process, as the quantities of various chemicals used and the possible exposure issues involved are much greater than a layperson would ever anticipate,” he added. Now the district now is looking for another property so it can get its plans submitted in time to qualify for matching state money.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain