Jay Apperson, spokesperson for the Maryland Department of the Environment, said Saturday morning that the department's emergency response division went to the site and found there was "extremely minimal environmental impact, limited to the burn site."
A person who answered the telephone at Coraluzzo Trucking's offices in New Jersey Saturday morning said there was no one around on the weekends to give a statement.
Fire companies responding to the fire included Water Witch Fire Company of Port Deposit and Community Fire Company of Perryville responded from Cecil County, according to Cecil Fire Blog.
Level Volunteer Fire Company, Darlington Volunteer Fire Company, Susquehanna Hose Company of Havre de Grace and Aberdeen Fire Department, all from Harford County, also send personnel and equipment to Port Deposit, according to Rich Gardiner, spokesperson for the Harford County Fire and Ambulance Association.
Friday's night's crash occurred along the same street where another tanker, carrying propane, went out of control on the steep hill coming down Route 272 on Aug. 14 and overturned at Main Street, before striking the corner of a waterfront condominium building. The truck driver was injured and the building was damaged, but emergency personnel were able to avert an explosion and no one else was injured.
The potential danger posed by accidents involving heavy trucks, as well as trains, many carrying hazardous materials, is a situation Port Deposit's 700 residents have long learned to accept as a condition of living there. The town sits along a narrow area between the river shore and a steep bluff to the east, with a major freight railroad line and a state highway running through it from end to end.
As far as accident concerns on the particularly dangerous stretch of road where Friday's accident occurred, Tome said the town has "done what we can."
The town has "lobbied the state successfully," regarding speed limits, traffic signs warning of the dangerous conditions and attempting to get law enforcement aware of speeding commercial vehicles, the mayor explained. The problem, he believes, is that drivers are "not adhering to the signage."
"We encourage everybody to have awareness," Tome said.
'Bad, real bad'
Tammy Fitzgerald, who lives on Main Street in Port Deposit, didn't see the crash, but she and her husband were coming into town within minutes, seconds even, of it happening.
"It was bad, real bad," Fitzgerald said around midnight Friday.
"We were coming down [Route] 222 into town. There were two pickup trucks ahead of us that stopped," Fitzgerald, who was driving, said. "I saw lights, but I thought maybe something happened and [fire] trucks were already down there. The closer we got I could hear a boom."
The driver front of them turned around and said, "It's bad, it's bad," she said.
Fitzgerald, who works for the Harford County State's Attorney's Office at the Family Justice Center in Bel Air, said she stood there for a minute then wondered if anyone had called 911 and decided to call herself.
She said she started to go down Route 222 to where it meets Main Street at the curve and that's when she realized there was fire.
"It was a gigantic fireball. Flames were going up the sides of the radio tower on the corner. As I came around the curve, I heard two more booms and realized the power lines were on fire," she said.
There is a house and trailer on the corner of the curve. Fitzgerald and her husband thought they were empty, but they weren't 100 percent sure and wanted to be able to help if someone was living in either.
Her husband was going down toward the homes through weeds and along a tree line to stay as far away from fire as he could, she said. Another man who was ahead of her husband was running back up the hill yelling "go, go, go," she said.
"As my husband started back up hill, I heard the biggest explosion that I had heard up to that point," Fitzgerald said. "I actually could feel the heat off that one. My husband said in the moment he thought he was a goner."
That was about the time they saw the first emergency vehicle responding.
"It's so incredibly sad for whoever was in that truck, if he really didn't get out," she said.
As Fitzgerald and her husband were heading back to their van, another tanker truck was coming down the hill, and all they could think of was that they had to stop it before it ran "down around the curve and into the huge fire," whose flames she said had to be at least three stories in the air.
Having just gone through an eerily similar experience not 10 days earlier, Fitzgerald was concerned about getting to her house, so after warning several cars not to go into town, she and her husband turned around to try and get back into town on Route 276, "before they shut everyone down."
