Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 15, 1995 TAG: 9505160002
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE AND RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: MONTVALE LENGTH: Long
But that was Texas. This is Montvale. She convinced herself she was safe.
Most people here do feel safe. The tanks have been part of the community for more than 30 years and nothing terrible has happened.
And if it ever does, some figure there wouldn't be anything left to worry about.
"I reckon if it's gonna blow, it's gonna blow Montvale plain off the map, clear down to Georgia," said Tom Meadows, who lives up the road from Taylor.
Storage-tank fires are rare. The visions people have of chain-explosions and hellish firestorms burning through Montvale are pretty farfetched, the experts say. If a tank does catch fire, it'll usually be confined, burning like a giant oil lantern.
Most people in Montvale are more worried about the tanks catching on fire than they are about oil leaking into their soil or ground water. Yet none of them seems to know what they would actually do in the case of an emergency at the farms.
Bedford County is responsible for disaster and evacuation plans there, but the county was almost five years late turning in a chemical emergency plan required by federal law. No one in the county administrator's office knows where the final draft of the plan is now.
An emergency planning committee also required by federal law hasn't met in years. One person listed in county records as an active member is dead. A person listed as an oil company representative has retired.
Annual inventories of hazardous chemicals in the county also are incomplete.
The oil companies take their own precautions against fire. Star Enterprise, for example, has a 10,000-gallon water tank and 500 gallons of chemical foam on its site.
Ed Flowers, Star's terminal manager, said his tank farm is "virtually safe, aside from terrorism." Star employees receive 40 hours of hazardous-waste training each year.
Only human error, such as welders working on pipelines, could cause a fire, he said. But Star drains the lines and shields them from wayward sparks before any repair work.
And, all the oil companies have professional oil-firefighting teams on call, though it can take as long as two hours for some to arrive because they're based out of state.
First to respond to the scene of an oil fire at Montvale would be the local Volunteer Fire Department, which has its headquarters about a block away from the tanks.
Some of the volunteers have received basic hazardous-material training, but they say they don't have the training or the equipment to keep an oil fire under control until qualified help could arrive.
"The only thing we could do is put water on the other tanks [to cool them] and let the [burning] tank burn," said David Ferguson, fire chief for the Montvale Volunteer Fire Department.
Instead, the locals probably would rely on hazardous-materials teams responding from Roanoke and Salem, 20 to 40 minutes away. Bedford County doesn't fund its own hazardous-materials team, even though several companies dealing in hazardous chemicals operate within the county.
In fact, if it wasn't for a lone volunteer who's trained in dealing with hazardous-materials spills, Bedford County would have no one immediately available to help it cope with such a disaster.
Montvale's volunteer fire company relies on donations, just like the Montvale Rescue Squad.
"That's a touchy subject," said Jessie Richards, the rescue squad's ambulance driver. Colonial Pipeline is the only oil company to give the squad a donation - $100, she said.
Ferguson said the Fire Department has sought donations from the oil companies, but received little or nothing in the way of funding or training from them. Colonial gave the volunteers about 200 gallons of chemical foam to combat fires, but Ferguson said it's old, outdated and useless for anything but practice.
It would take about 1,500 to 2,000 gallons of foam to control a burning above-ground gasoline storage tank fire, said Barry Baker, assistant chief for the Fairfax Fire Department.
Baker ought to know about fighting oil fires. His department gives its employees specialized training because of the tank farms in his community - which store one-third more oil than Montvale's.
No tanks have ever caught fire in Fairfax, but in the early 1970s two firefighters died during a blaze at one of the tank farms' loading racks.
Fairfax firefighters go to out-of-state conferences and attend seminars about oil fires. They also study real oil fires and confer with oil companies in their area several times a year about disaster planning.
Without specialized training, fire companies responding to such a disaster might cause more problems, Baker said. "It takes somebody with a lot of technical knowledge to fight these things. If you don't have the proper amount of foam, then you're just filling the tank with water and that means sooner or later, the [oil] will flow out the top."
If too much water is applied to tanks, some also can be knocked off their foundations, which leads to bigger spills.
"It's not that [rural fire departments] aren't capable of fighting [oil] fires," Baker said. "It's just a different kind of fire."
When Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act in the early 1980s, all states were required by 1988 to create local emergency planning committees to prepare for chemical disasters.
No Virginia locality met the deadline. Most prepared their plans a month or two later. Bedford County turned in its plan five years late.
During those five years, it was ineligible for federal funds that help localities recover the cost of responding to a chemical emergency. Some counties, such as Botetourt, still don't have a plan on file.
The draft copies of Bedford County's plan, which are all that's available at the county administrator's office, are incomplete, generic and sometimes puzzling. For instance, county schools are divided into two categories: A school is either at-risk of contamination from a chemical emergency, or it's designated as a safe haven for citizens to gather in case of disaster.
Montvale Elementary School, which is surrounded by tank farms and has been evacuated because of a spill in the past, is listed as a gathering place.
Bedford County was also required to set up an emergency planning committee, stage drills and update the county disaster plan annually.
But the committee never staged an emergency drill and hasn't updated the plan, according to state and county officials.
"Most of the people weren't interested," said Tommy Harper, a committee member and the county's volunteer hazardous-materials specialist. "They had the attitude that it can't happen here, but I know better."
Harper has volunteered his services to the county since the early 1980s. He teaches hazardous-materials classes to volunteer rescue and fire squads around the state.
"The closest thing Bedford County has to a Haz-Mat vehicle is my station wagon," Harper said. A fire at the tank farms "would be a state effort," he said. "It's not going to be a Bedford response. That's a given."
For one thing, he said, to get the amount of water needed to fight an oil fire, "We'd have to drain Goose Creek. It's unbelievable the amount of water you'd have to flow. It would take about 4,000 gallons a minute continuous flow, and we don't have that."
Normally, when the county dispatch center hears about a spill at the tank farms, it calls Harper, who goes to the scene and coordinates the local response.
"When I'm called, things usually get handled like they're supposed to," he said. But if companies don't notify the county about spills, he doesn't get called.
Though oil storage and pipeline companies in Montvale have notified state and federal authorities of spills of thousands of gallons of oil products since 1990, Harper didn't hear about any of them.
He hasn't been out to the tank farms in several years. When he has been, it's been minor stuff, he said, like bystanders who reported that ducks had gotten coated with oil from swimming in an oil company's spill-containment pond.
"I don't know what the county would've done if I hadn't volunteered. They'd be up a creek, I guess. I've just tried to keep them from getting too wet."
Federal law also requires companies that store large amounts of hazardous chemicals to submit annual inventories of those chemicals to the county.
None of the tank farm facilities has more than three annual inventories on file at the county. There should be at least twice that number. The federal government can fine the companies up to $75,000 a day for not filing them.
But the fact that the county doesn't have the inventories doesn't mean the companies haven't sent them. The county's records are kept in cardboard boxes, sometimes in different folders for the same facilities, sometimes just misfiled.
It's the job of the county's emergency services coordinator to make sure the inventories and disaster plans are on file. Bedford County had a part-time coordinator until he retired last spring.
Since then, another county worker has filled in. The Board of Supervisors considered abolishing the position as a paid job until local volunteer fire and rescue squads demanded that a full-time coordinator be hired.
The county now is interviewing applicants. In the meantime, the annual chemical inventories are coming in, waiting in a growing stack of mail.
So who's responsible for making sure the county has an updated plan and an emergency planning committee? The county and the state point at each other.
"Are they providing us with any funding for that? Or is this just another unfunded mandate?" Bedford County Administrator Bill Rolfe said.
He said the county has done its part by producing the plan. If the state or federal government wants it updated, the county should be given the money to do so.
The state has no regulatory powers over the county's emergency planning, said Linwood Grant, who heads the state Department of Emergency Services' chemical emergency planning branch. "The only responsibility for my office is to provide technical assistance and guidance for developing the plan and to revise the plan."
Jack Rowell, regional coordinator for the department, said: "If there is no plan and something goes down and people get hurt, they're going to sue the county. A lot of the jurisdictions don't want to realize that, but it's a fact.
"Let's face it, the Board of Supervisors, if something's not biting them in the butt right now, [emergency planning] is going to take a lower priority than the school budget or whatever else is going on."
by CNB