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NWMO | I live about 45 miles south of Red Oak and it's a bad deal really. When I was in college I worked at a seed/chemical/fertilizer dealer and stuff happens just like it does in farming. Valves/hoses crack out, people forget things, accidentally spill some chemical here or there. To me it's just the severity of the mistake that is so mind boggling.
I could understand someone accidentally leaving a valve cracked open and a few thousand gallons spilling, but 265K gallons? Thats over 60 gallons a minute for the entire weekend which means that valve had to be open a long ways. And to have that amount tells me it was a large tank, probably one of the big ones with a staircase. The only thing I could see being the answer is that they have a big tank plumbed into an overhead fill tank for fast loading tankers/trailers and they were filling the overhead and someone assumed that someone else was going to shut the valve off when the tank was full while the other guy assumed the same thing and both clocked out and went home none the wiser. Even still, it's a bad situation. Looks really bad for agriculture.
I'd expect some hefty fines to be coming the co-op's way. The fish population will bounce back over time, it just sucks when stuff like this happens. | |
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Update on the fertilizer spill.
