It should have been a fun February Friday morning at North Surry High as the night before the Lady Greyhounds basketball team defeated Southwestern Randolph 59-49 in their second-round playoff game to advance to the next round.
However, staff members who were first on campus the next morning caught a whiff of something right away that was amiss. A fuel leak in the boiler room had sent hundreds of gallons of fuel oil right down the drain. A drain that runs under the parking lot and empties out on the banks above the practice football field near Stewarts Creek.
Had the staffs’ noses not worked, the Doggett Water Plant was also an early canary sounding the alarm as they were detecting higher levels of fluorocarbons in the water than should have been there.
In recounting the incident on Monday, Surry County Schools Superintendent Dr. Travis Reeves said it had been their goal to get word as soon as it was clear there was no danger. Parents were scared upon hearing emergency crews were at the school, and then heard of a chemical or fuel spill. He expressed empathy for the anxiety the situation may have caused parents.
On that Thursday evening in February it rained the better part of an inch, and it was this rain that exacerbated the problem. “Had we not had that rain, I do not think the oil would have reached Stewarts Creek,” he told the county commissioners Monday. He mentioned being thankful the spill did not happen over the weekend when it may have gone unnoticed.
The day before the leak there had been a problem at North Surry where four boilers fed by a 20,000-gallon fuel tank heat the school. A hose connects the boiler system to a 100-gallon reservoir tank in the boiler room itself, and a drain is in the floor for any spillage.
Reeves described the system as designed “to make sure that when the boilers shut down that the fuel doesn’t go back into the big tank and make sure we have constant pressure, otherwise we have air in the lines and we’d be sending folks over there all the time to refire the boiler.”
“We had a pump malfunction the day prior, so we added a temporary pump and a temporary hose, and the temporary hose got a hole overnight. We are not sure why a hole came in the hose overnight; but it did.”
In the end though, it is human nature to look for the root cause of this spill. Something happened somewhere along the line, “Was it a substandard replacement part? A substandard repair?” Commissioner Van Tucker asked.
With a pressure rating of 225 pounds of pressure, Reeves was baffled as to how the hose could have failed since “there was really no pressure on the hose itself,” he said Monday.
A sample of the tubing in question was presented to the county commissioners for visual inspection, with Tucker adding, “I notice it says made in China and reinforced. It wasn’t reinforced nearly enough Dr. Reeves.” The insurance company has dispatched a forensics investigator to assess the tube, pipe, and hose for just such a defect as Tucker may have been alluding.
The commissioner went one step further by asking Reeves if he felt there was any chance that this had not been an accident, but rather an act of vandalism. Reeves answered in the negative, Tucker though seemed to have some lingering questions about the situation and was keen to allow an investigation to continue.
Reeves said Thursday morning that the investigators had questions about the “down pressure” on the six-inch replacement hose “that was right off the truck. We keep a length of it on the truck, so it was new, and it has a life expectancy of 8-12 months.”
Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, the maximum insurance payout is $50,000 which would pay for only part of the response and cleanup bill presented by Ultimate Towing & Recovery of more than $233,000.
Surry County has submitted their own invoice to the school system for $4,079 for their Haz Mat response to the fuel spill.
Dr. Reeves came to the board armed with a plan to reallocate money already appropriated to completed projects that wound up coming in under budget.
“This is not your fault, not our fault, but we need to pay it.” Tucker suggested the board approve Dr. Reeves’ reallocation of $34,000 to be put immediately toward the outstanding cleanup total, “without appropriating any more money to this problem until we have time for… the investigation to run its course.”
Commissioner Eddie Harris was clear, “This business needs to get paid.” The commissioners agreed to reallocate the money Reeves asked for but then hold off for up to 30 days any further disbursement from the board until the insurance company has completed its work.
Harris went on to remind the board of a similar fuel spill caused by a leak in the boiler room at Elkin High that spilled into the Big Elkin Creek. Elkin has since converted to natural gas, ironically a process that is soon to get underway at North Surry High.
Frontier Natural Gas has been extending its service area, “We are going to connect on to the line that Franklin is already on.” Reeves also said Surry Central has made its transition to natural gas with East Surry still to have its conversion to natural gas.
That’s too little too late for Reeves and the commissioners as they stare down a quarter million-dollar expense no one saw coming. The bottom line for the fuel cleanup, environmental impact, and labor for Ultimate Recovery’s employees totals $233,575.
Dirt that was tainted with fuel oil had to be transported to Asheboro to be cleansed at a cost of $15,342. Usage of dump trucks to haul that dirt for 388 hours cost $45,784. When factoring in backhoes, skid steers and the rest of the equipment that number doubles.
To hire a geologist to be on site for reporting and sampling during the process cost $7,500. Approximately $45,000 was spent on labor for the contracted cleanup crew.
Reeves explained another large line item, “They call them pigs, but they are the round white objects that go across the top of the water on the creeks. We had several of those between the high school and the water plant.”
288 booms were used to float atop water at a cost of $256 a piece making this the single largest line item from the cleanup at $73,728.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com