Opinion: Train Drivers to Deal With Spills

By Thomas Moses

President

Spill Center Inc.

This Opinion piece appears in the July 18 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

A transportation accident or emergency release that results in an environmental hazard is, for most businesses, an extraordinary occurrence. Yet every business needs to be prepared for such an event. Spills of hazardous materials, diesel fuel and other regulated substances are subject to a maze of environmental regulations.

Nearly 30,000 federal, state and local jurisdictions across the United States require incident reports from spill generators.

Shippers and transporters who are unprepared to handle spill emergencies quickly and comply with all reporting requirements can end up with major expenses for cleanup and disposal services, liability issues and penalties for failing to file incident reports on time.

When in doubt about whether a spill involves a reportable quantity — report it. Failure to file required reports can bring stiff fines, making it unwise to try to cover up a spill.

Any fleet can become a spill generator. The time to prepare for an environmental release is before it happens. Fuel spills and other accidental releases of hazardous or regulated materials, even in small quantities, can turn into expensive incidents for the spill generator not adequately prepared to deal with them.

Driver training is an important aspect of spill preparedness. Trucks should be equipped with spill kits containing plugs, trenching tools and absorbent materials that can be used to stop fuel leaks and limit damage to the environment. Drivers should be instructed in the use of items in these kits.

Drivers also should know the location of fuel shutoff valves on their trucks and understand the importance of preventing leaking fuel from running into streams or storm drains. Even a minor spill can wreak environmental havoc if the fuel reaches water.

The EPA classifies spilled fuel as hazardous waste. Any incident resulting in fuel or oil reaching water should be reported to the National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting oil and chemical spills.

Environmental liability for spill damages goes to the spill generator, even if the release occurred as a result of a highway accident in which the truck driver was blameless. As the spill generator, you would be responsible to contain the spill, report it — and then clean it up.

Thorough documentation of every environmental release is the best way to maintain a legally defensible position against third-party claimants and avoid being included as a responsible party to a pre-existing contamination problem. The driver involved in a spill should keep a detailed log of all actions taken after the release to document that it was separate in time and separate in nature and was the subject of a separate and complete response and remediation.

For a spill involving diesel fuel, the driver should record the quantity spilled (based on the latest fueling and miles driven), times and phone numbers of calls he made to report the incident, actions he took to contain the leak, actions taken by emergency responders at the scene, the number of responders, time on scene and equipment used. That driver’s log will provide a written record that can be used to place the company in a legally defensible position.

The key to staying out of trouble with environmental authorities is to know which reports you owe to whom after accidental releases of fuel, spent solvents, cleaning materials, toxic chemicals and other hazardous materials used in a typical fleet operation. If someone in authority says it isn’t reportable, that is the best defense against third-party claims related to the spill. Just make sure the driver gets the name, position and phone number of the person who said you didn’t need to report it.

Environmental authorities take their reporting requirements very seriously. One private fleet was fined $75,000 by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection after a routine diesel fuel spill of 30 gallons. The truck swerved to avoid hitting a car and scraped a saddle tank against a guard rail, puncturing the tank.

The driver, equipped with a spill kit, stopped the flow from the tank, and the company filed a full accident report with the New Jersey State Police. But their fine came from the failure to comply with the state’s environmental reporting requirement. The police had not mentioned the requirement, and the company thought it had done everything that was required of it. In this case, ignorance was anything but bliss.

The author founded Spill Center Inc. — an environmental claims management company — in 1990. The business is based in Hudson, Mass.