The Fayetteville Fire Department will receive a nearly $10,000 grant to purchase specialized equipment to improve its response to chemical leaks from passing trains.
Motiva Enterprises announced the awarding of the Motiva First Responders Grant in a brief presentation early Tuesday afternoon at its terminal on Shaw Mill Road.
“We’ve always been a company that works with the community,” said Scott Dilling, manager of the Atlantic Coast Complex for Motiva, who presented the check with members of the Fire Department and its hazardous-materials team and Motiva terminal operators watching. “It helps them with response to Motiva issues. … This grant identifies a set of priorities.”
The new emergency response kit, according to a Fayetteville Fire Department news release, “will allow the hazmat team to contain potentially deadly chemical leaks more quickly and more efficiently.”
The news release said that substances identified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as extremely hazardous are transported along Cumberland County’s 144 miles of rail lines.
T.J. McLamb, battalion chief and fire marshal for the Fire Department, said chemical leaks are not a big problem in Fayetteville, but added, “It’s a great risk with all the railroad cars that come through our city.”
Hazmat program manager David Richtmeyer, an assistant chief with the Fire Department, said railroad safety is actually very good here.
“The amount of incidents they have is actually kept down because of all the safety features they have,” he said Monday. “However, because of the amount of product they carry, when they do have an incident, it can be very large … in scope and involve a lot of people, a lot of casualties.”
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Richtmeyer said a major rail accident has never happened in Cumberland County.
Perhaps the nearest and largest rail accident in the area, he recalled, happened about a decade ago in Bladenboro in nearby Bladen County.
Roughly 300 to 400 people were forced to leave their homes temporarily when a train overturned, accounts from February 2013 said. One of the 10 cars that overturned was carrying ammonia, a hazardous chemical.
No leaks and no injuries were reported, news accounts said.
Depending on the product being transported by rail tank, the risk of a spill can be significant for the public and hazmat responders, Richtmeyer said.
“That’s why we train. That’s why we have tools that allow us to mitigate these leaks quickly to try to limit that risk,” he said.
“The potential is definitely there,” Richtmeyer added. “But with the training we get, with the equipment that we have and how we go about putting our people in the hot zone, what we call the danger area, we do everything we can to mitigate that risk. We do what we have to do to try to save lives.”
Fayetteville has one hazmat team with 45 firefighters and emergency medical technicians. Their primary duties are responding to fires and EMS calls, Richtmeyer said.
The hazmat team is one of seven statewide. Cumberland County contracts with the city for hazmat services.
The Fayetteville Fire Department works with the county and the state to provide hazmat response in 10 surrounding counties. The team can be called to assist anywhere in the state through a response agreement designed to protect people across the state.
Fayetteville fire officials have described the department’s current equipment for handling derailed chemical spills as “heavy and more difficult to assemble.”
The new equipment to be financed with the grant announced Tuesday will help reduce mitigation times. The Indian Springs-manufactured ERK is designed to fit a variety of railcar housings and arrangements. The company says the kit will work on, among others, standard chlorine housings, sulfur dioxide and ammonia.
“If we do have an incident regarding a tank car, any valving, we’ll be able to mitigate the leak quicker with lighter and much easier-to-assemble (equipment),” said Richtmeyer.
Motiva notified the Fire Department that the grant was available, he said. Fayetteville firefighters have trained jointly with the Houston-headquartered Motiva in the past.
The specialized equipment that is being purchased is “a little bit more user-friendly than the older one we have,” he said. “Lighter, different metals, different alloys.”
Michael Futch covers Fayetteville and education for CityView. He can be reached at mfutch@cityviewnc.com.
