Belle, W. Va.-State investigators have found little or no environmental damage from the release of nearly 5,000 gallons of 35 percent phosphoric acid from a storage tank that broke open at the DuPont plant here while being filled from a tanker Dec. 22. “At some point during that filling operation the tank sprang a fairly sizeable leak around the bottom and lost the whole contents,” Mike Dorsey, chief of homeland security and emergency response for the West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection, told Green Markets. “Fortunately, most of the acid was caught in the secondary containment.” Dorsey estimated that 100 gallons, containing about 30 gallons of acid, got into the Kanawha River, but being a fairly mild acid didn’t cause any damage. DuPont crews apparently helped the situation by using a suction machine to clean up as much of the spilled acid as possible. “There were no fish kills that we could find or none has been reported,” he said. “There’s a lot of water in the river there and we’re thinking that they didn’t have a fish kill.” He didn’t know what the final determination of the regulators would be, but said the cleanup was handled very quickly and “I’m guessing they are not going to do anything.” DuPont officials said that the acid is used as a nutrient for microbes in the waste treatment facility at the Belle plant, located on a 723-acre site along the Kanawha River. Belle has manufactured various specialty and agricultural chemical products since 1926.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain