environmental Strategist, between the lines: There are three main benefits businesses should look to gain through transferring some of their environmental liabilities to a third party insurance company.
- All policies come with defense coverage. As the environmental loss detailed in the article below unfolds, you can be sure there will be plenty of legal issues and costs.
- All policies come with specialists to assist in handling a claim. Any time you can have the federal, state and local government pounding on your door along with the press this is not a fender bender and you need specialists who can run damage control central.
- In the majority of cases the cost to clean up the environmental problem is far less than the cost from third parties mainly for business interruption. I am confident with this loss there will be bodily injury claims along with property damage and much more.
One part of performing an environmental Risk Assessment (eRA) is to find out who your neighbors are. In this case you have a company that was cited by the EPA for violations, basically an accident waiting to happen.
You may say well this company dealt with hazardous waste and you do not have any businesses that have that exposure. You may not deal with businesses that treat, store and dispose of hazardous waste but you can be assured you deal with customer who deal with hazardous materials. The Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) is a list of approximately 700 of the worst human-made chemicals. There are approximately 80,000 businesses in the United States that buy, store and work with TRI chemicals.
If you are not talking with your customers about their environmental issues, when they have an environmental loss, the only coverage they may have is your E&O insurance.
If you want to grow your business while being indispensable to your client’s, go to www.estrategist.com
Chemical Fire Forces 17,000 to Flee Town
By WILLIAM L. HOLMES, AP
APEX, N.C. (Oct. 6) – As many as 17,000 people were urged to flee homes on the outskirts of Raleigh early Friday as flames shot from a burning hazardous waste plant and a chlorine cloud rose high over the area.
No employees were believed to have been inside the EQ Industrial Services plant when the fire started late Thursday and a series of explosions began rocking the property.
Eighteen people, many of them law enforcement officers, were taken to emergency rooms with respiratory problems, hospital officials said.
EQ Industrial Services handles a wide array of industrial waste, from paints to solvents, and houses chemicals such as chlorine, pesticides, herbicides, sulfur and fertilizer.
Because of the potential dangers in that mix, firefighters waited for daybreak to determine how to attack the blaze, officials said. Friday morning, area schools and downtown Apex were closed, and police blocked off streets into the area as the plant continued to burn.
“You can’t put foam or water on it,” Mayor Keith Weatherly said. “That just exacerbates it.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what had started the fire. The flames appeared to have jumped overnight to four petroleum tanks belonging to another company, which may have accounted for some of the explosions, Weatherly said.
EQ spokesman Robert Doyle said the Wayne, Mich.-based company was mobilizing its emergency response team to help with the clean up. About 25 employees work at the Apex plant, but all had left the building by 7 p.m. Thursday, he said.
“Because of the many different types of waste that we bring in, it’s very difficult to determine the cause of the fire,” he said.
In March, the state Department of Natural Resources had fined EQ $32,000 for six violations at the plant, including failing to “maintain and operate the facility to minimize the possibility of a sudden or non-sudden release of hazardous waste … which could threaten human health or the environment.” But Doyle cautioned that the violations might not have had anything to do with the fire.
“That could range from anything — like a spill of materials that could get in a storm drain,” he said. “It could be completely unrelated to something like a fire or explosion.”
Officials initially urged about half the Apex’s residents to evacuate, then expanded the request about two hours later to thousands more when a plume of smoke and chemicals moved.
“We’ll be making more evacuations as time progresses,” town manager Bruce Radford said.
Overnight, a yellow haze lingered over downtown, and residents as far as 2 miles away said they could see the plume or smell the chemicals, officials said.
The evacuation covered much of the west side of Apex, about 10 miles southwest of Raleigh. Authorities opened a shelter at an elementary school, where a few hundred residents and their pets waited for news about the fire.
Cory Cataldo said he and his wife and two young sons were awakened around 1 a.m. by a knock at the door, and a man told them to evacuate because of a chemical fire.
“That’s about all I needed to know,” said Cataldo, who said his wife and sons have asthma. “My first concern was just to get everybody out.”
Of those who didn’t evacuate, Radford said: “They are putting themselves in very grave danger by being around this smoke.”
About 100 elderly residents were evacuated from a nursing home in Apex and taken to nearby hospitals for shelter.
Even Apex’s 911 center and fire department were evacuated because of the fire.
Radford said both Apex and Wake County declared a state of emergency, starting the process of asking for government assistance. Radford said calls to 911 were being received by Wake County, and the “reverse 911” system was used to call homes in Apex and relay emergency information.
Hospital officials confirmed early Friday that 18 people have been sent to emergency rooms in Raleigh and Cary. Eight of those are law enforcement officers and one is a firefighter who complained of nausea and respiratory problems. The others were residents being treated for “respiratory distress,” said WakeMed spokeswoman Heather Monackey.
“It’s quite scary,” said Apex resident Andrew Smith, who lives about a mile west of the fire, just outside the evacuation zone. “The sky is definitely lit up. We can see a big column of smoke and occasionally flashes of light from explosions.”
10/6/06 09:36 ET
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.