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An industrial firefighting team continues to fight a fire that engulfs a chemical plant in northern Illinois and has forced the evacuation of nearby homes and businesses
By The Associated Press
June 15, 2021, 11:52 PM
• 4 minutes to read
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ROCKTON, Illinois – An industrial firefighting team continued to fight a fire Tuesday that destroyed a chemical plant in northern Illinois and forced the evacuation of nearby homes and businesses.
Before pouring firefighting foam on the Chemtool plant in Rockton, Louisiana-based US Fire Pumps dug a trench around the facility and installed straws along the Rock River to prevent remaining materials from escaping into the village’s drinking water source.
Rockton Fire Chief Kirk Wilson said the plume of smoke from the fire has largely dissipated as a result of the efforts of US fire pumps.
That’s what they do,” Wilson said, adding that the company has larger pumps and more firefighting delivery capacity than local fire departments. “At this point in time, we have not detected any visible runoff in the waterway (which is) just west of Chemtool and into our main waterway.”
Although the fire was brought under control, Wilson said the fire was not completely extinguished.
“This will continue to burn. When we are in the repair phase and we are moving debris from place to place, things may develop,” Wilson said. “But we want to assure the public that it is under control. It is in the area of origin of the building where the fire occurred.”
The resulting explosions and fires on Monday prompted officials to evacuate an estimated 1,000 residents living within a 1 mile (1.6 km) radius of the plant and urged anyone within 3 miles (4.8 km) to wear masks due to the threat posed by the threat posed to them, Wilson said. Airborne impurities.
He said it was not clear when the eviction order would be lifted, but asked residents to “remain vigilant”.
We do this out of extreme caution. “We’ve come a long way in putting out a very difficult fire with myriad chemicals,” said Sandra Martell, director of the Winnebago County Department of Health. “We want to assure our residents that they are safe to go home.”
Once the fires are extinguished, Wilson said, investigators will begin to look for its cause.
Chemtool’s Winnebago County plant was fitted with the sprinkler system in 2008, but Wilson said he doesn’t know if the system is still active when an explosion and fire occur.
Bill Snyder, Vice President of Operations at Lubrizol Corp. Chemtool’s parent company, said it had no information on a possible cause, but the company would cooperate with authorities. He said it was too early to address the question of whether the factory fires had failed.
Lubrizol Corp is owned by the Berkshire Hathaway Group of Nebraska-based Warren Buffett.
More than 80 fire departments help fight the fires, Wilson said, working eight-hour shifts at a time.
Snyder apologized to the local community, especially those who had to evacuate their homes, noting that the fires had had a “very severe impact” on residents.
Alicia Tate Nadeau, director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, said state officials are working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other entities to monitor air quality, as well as make sure no pollutants enter local water supplies.
“This is an ongoing event. We are not out of this yet,” Tate Nadeau said.
WLS-TV reported that a federal agency inspected the Chemtool plant less than a month before Monday’s explosion, which sent debris falling into nearby areas. On May 20, inspectors from the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration investigated a complaint at the plant.
The station stated that the summary record of this inspection does not explain what was examined in the factory. The station stated that this record states only that the complaint is related to safety and health, and that the case is still open.
OSHA officials said they have six months to complete their investigation at the plant, and no more information will be released until this work is completed, WLS-TV reported. There are no other pending cases or any violations in US records relating to the plant.
The station reported that Kamtul has not recorded any violations from the US Environmental Protection Agency for at least the past three years.
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