Did you say "grass" or "gas"?

What do you get when you combine weed killer with aviation gasoline? Answer: An expensive mess. Sounds like a kid’s joke, but it’s no joke when your driver pumps 5,000 gallons of concentrated weed killer into an aviation gasoline storage tank. To make it worse, the mistake was discovered by a pilot - who found out that his Cessna didn’t run too well on weed-be-gone. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and you’ve got 10,000 gallons of gasoline that’ll never grow weeds, and a mad pilot with a plane full of defoliant. What do you do?

The trouble started earlier that morning, when a driver was loaded with weed killer, but was given directions and instructions to deliver aviation gasoline. Our poor driver pulled up to the aviation gas fill pipe and dutifully delivered his product - a product very different from aviation gasoline. The driver didn’t notice the absence of a flammable liquid placard on his trailer, or the difference in the odor of the product. His directions said deliver to a specific fill pipe, and that’s just what he did.

Our troubled fleet safety manager called Cura Emergency Services (CES) for help with this mix-up. The fleet safety manager had confidence that CES could clean up the mess and find cost-effective disposal for the ruined product. As soon as CES was notified, and experienced Incident Manager was assigned to the project and our fleet safety manager no longer had to worry about the details of the cleanup.

The Incident Manager hired a local contractor to decontaminate the affected aircraft, and then instructed the contractor to obtain a sample of the gasoline and the weed killer. Although 5,000 gallons of each product was in the same tank, one was oil and one was water-based, so they didn’t mix - the gasoline was floating on the weed killer. Two samples were collected and sent for a disposal analysis.

Meanwhile, the Incident Manager was looking at disposal alternatives: burn it, recycle it, or ...? A representative of the airport was called, and it turned out that he routinely buys the same defoliant to kill weeds on his property. If CES could arrange for the airport owner to accept the weed killer as off-specification product, there would be huge disposal cost savings.

Giving away 5,000 gallons of weed killer isn’t easy. What about future liability? Can the airport manager handle the material properly? Is there a way to legally store the material on site? Can we separate the gasoline from the weed killer?

The contractor was instructed to use a vacuum truck to recover the layer of gasoline from atop the weed killer. Once vacuumed off, the gasoline was filtered, dried, and returned to another storage tank for non-aviation use by the airport - half of the disposal problem was solved.

A rental tanker was brought to the site, and most of the weed killer was transferred from the gasoline tank into the temporary tanker. This left a small amount of gasoline and defoliant in the tank. Disposal was arranged for the 200 gallons of mixed material in the tank, and then the tank was thoroughly cleaned by the contractor and placed back into aviation gasoline service.

It was easy to get the weed killer out of the tank, but what to do with it now that it’s staged on site? The CES Incident Manager then negotiated with the responsible party, the airport, and the State to reach an agreement about the resting place for the weed killer. The airport agreed to take full responsibility fro the safe storage, handling, and use of the material, and the responsible party received written assurance from the airport that the material was now fully owned by the airport.

This incident illustrates how a cost effective disposal was arranged for a potentially expensive mistake. Only four drums of tank cleaning waste were transported from the site - much less than the 10,000 gallons of affected products. The airport was pleased with its lifetime supply of weed killer, and ultimate responsibility for the product was removed from the transporter.