Bob may have picked the worst day of his life to quit smoking - he just told his company president that he needed forty grand to throw away some contaminated sand. Embarrassment, intimidation, and thoughts of career death were racing through Bob’s mind. Why wasn’t he prepared? What’s a fleet manager to do when one of his trucks flies off of the highway at 80 miles an hour, leaving a trail of hazardous waste drums scattered across the interstate? It wasn’t his fault, was it? Poor Bob hides in his office and is slapping on a couple more nicotine patches when the phone rings. It’s the company president, calling with the solution to Bob’s environmental nightmare.

Fortunately for our troubled fleet manager, the president had previously discussed emergency response preparedness and waste management with Cura Emergency Services (CES). He knew CES could help untangle the regulatory web surrounding this cleanup and disposal. Bob immediately called CES and an experienced Incident Manager was assigned to help Bob make his problem disappear.

Bob’s trouble began early one morning on Interstate 20 in middle-of-nowhere, Texas. A tractor-trailer fully loaded with drums of waste parts cleaning solvent and paint jackknifed and plowed into a roadside ditch. Drums of waste were everywhere - leaking. The local fire chief took control of the incident and immediately dropped over 30 tons of sand onto the roadway, onto the drums, onto the shoulder, and onto anything else he could cover. Bad move, but the chief wasn’t concerned with long-term issues, he wanted to reopen the road and protect public safety. Somebody else was going to pick up the bill. According the "mixture rule" in the Federal hazardous waste regulations, any material mixed with a listed hazardous waste makes the entire mixture a listed hazardous waste. In under three hours, approximately 50 gallons of spilled solvents had been converted into 30 tons of hazardous waste - and disposal costs were multiplied ten fold.

Once the fire chief was certain that the spilled material was not going to burst into flames, he left the scene and allowed a cleanup contractor to enter the site to pick up the tons of freshly made hazardous waste. The contractor picked up all 30 tons of sand and stored it in rolloff containers staged on the shoulder of the Interstate. Then, the contractor declared all of the material hazardous waste and obtained disposal approval at a hazardous waste incinerator located two states away. The costs were enormous, but the contractor was marking up his reimbursables by twenty percent, so the more the disposal cost, the more easy money would land in the contractor’s wallet. Good for the contractor - bad for our poor fleet manager who had to tell his boss that he needed twice the company’s monthly revenue to pay for disposal.

Enter the CES Incident Manager. In addition to national spill management, CES also provides waste management services for our clients. CES Incident Managers are also experienced disposal coordinators. Upon notification, CES immediately called the contractor and stopped the costly incineration of the sand just in time - transportation had already been scheduled for later that week. The Incident Manager then proposed a better solution. The contractor was directed to collect a composite sample from each of the four rolloff containers, and the samples would be used to make a hazardous waste determination. The samples were sent to a lab and analyzed for the characteristics of listed and restricted hazardous wastes.  If the results were favorable, $1,000 worth of analytical would save $35,000 in disposal.

When the analytical results came in, it was good news. The waste sand was not a hazardous waste, and the solvent concentrations were below the land-ban treatment standards. CES then obtained a disposal approval from the State of Texas and from the local landfill. Once the sand was transported to the landfill - one in the same state as the waste - CES requested and obtained a letter of closure from the state, and the incident was closed.

Today, Bob is a happy man - one call to CES saved his company over $35,000 on one incident alone. In addition, he entered a spill management partnership with CES so he won’t be caught unprepared for the next spill. Bob’s company is ready to keep environmental incidents under control. Shouldn’t you be prepared too?