Hazardous Chemicals

A temporary airtight enclosure has been erected at the Dundalk Marine Terminal in preparation for the removal of hazardous chemicals taken in January from the freighter Santa Clara I after it lost 441 barrels of poisonous arsenic trioxide at sea in a violent storm.The material is concentrated liquid magnesium phosphide, an ingredient of fumigants used to control pests in warehouses and rail cars. Four 55-gallon drums of the material appeared to be damaged when the ship reached port after the storm.

On behalf of Blue Water Baltimore's staff, board and membership, I would like to express sincere gratitude to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Alfred Foxx, director of the Baltimore Department of Public Works, for reinstating the hazardous waste drop-off program which will occur on April 30, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute parking lot at Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane. Continuing this vital service, even in these times of limited revenues, is a demonstration of the city's commitment to the revitalization of Baltimore's streams and harbor.

A unique kind of tall ship has just sailed into town: Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, famed for its seagoing confrontations with whalers, nuclear weapons testers and boatloads of toxic trash. The international environmental group is celebrating 30 years of "raising hell to save the planet," as its motto proclaims, but the Greenpeace crew is not planning to scale any downtown skyscrapers or plug any factory outfall pipes during the ship's five-day Inner Harbor stay. Instead the three-masted schooner, its green hull emblazoned with rainbows and doves, is on a five-month East Coast goodwill cruise.

CSX Transportation finished the removal of derailed cars from the Howard Street Tunnel today and is expected to resume rail traffic through it this evening, according to a railroad spokesman. Thirteen cars of a 79-car freight train left the tracks Thursday in the tunnel and outside its northern portal at Mount Royal Avenue for reasons yet to be determined, said CSX spokesman Bob Sullivan. With the cars removed, he said, railroad officials were repairing and inspecting the tracks to prepare for a resumption of traffic.

The Maryland Department of the Environment has filed a civil complaint against a Brooklyn Park pharmaceutical firm charging it dumped wastewater at the Aberdeen Water Treatment Plant without state permission.Kanasco Ltd., which manufactures synthetic penicillin, allegedly dumped industrial wastewater at the Aberdeen Waste Water Treatment Plant without state approval on June 10, 19 and 26 of this year, said Mike Sullivan, a Department of the Environment spokesman.Mr. Sullivan said the state does not know whether the wastewater was hazardous, but Aberdeen city officials said they asked the company for a lab analysis certifying the wastewater contained no hazardous chemicals before accepting it at their plant.

The Brandywine Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office, a former military hazardous waste storage site in southern Prince George's County, has been added to the federal Superfund list of contaminated sites, the Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday.The Air Force has been working since 1988 to clean up the 8-acre site in Andrews, upstream of Mattawoman Creek, a prime recreational fishing spot. From at least the 1950s through the 1980s, Defense Department agencies stored electrical equipment and hazardous chemicals there.

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND - Firefighters at Aberdeen Proving Ground were fighting a brush fire of more than 100 acres last night that began during scheduled ordnance testing, an installation official said. "It's a very large fire, and we're probably going to be fighting it tomorrow," said spokesman George Mercer. The blaze, which was reported at about 10 a.m. Monday, began on a firing range and dry conditions contributed to its spread, Mercer said. He added it is not near any of the installation's environmental cleanup sites, which include aging munitions piles and hazardous chemicals.

Any attempts to reduce the flow of hazardous chemicals through Baltimore's Howard Street Tunnel, where a chemical-laden train derailed July 18 and burned for four days under ground, would face almost insurmountable legal and practical obstacles, safety experts say. And the technology that might make the tunnel safer is so expensive and glitch-prone that it has rarely been tried. After the derailment of a CSX train carrying eight tank cars of acid and other dangerous chemicals, Gov. Parris N. Glendening promised to convene a task force to look at ways to make the tunnel safer.

Hours after 11 South Baltimore residents were taken to area hospitals for possible chemical exposure, city Health Commissioner Peter L. Beilenson declared a warehouse site a public health threat yesterday, in an effort to speed up removal of hazardous chemicals there. Beilenson's emergency order, his first since taking office eight years ago, clears the way for the city to have the site cleaned up if the owner does not do it by today, Mayor Martin O'Malley said last night. "If he doesn't agree to do it by noon, we're going to go in and do it," O'Malley said of the owner.

FREDERICK -- The Army is providing water to five homes near Fort Detrick here after toxic chemicals found on the post also were found in their wells.Unsafe levels of cancer-causing chemicals were found in the drinking water of two homes, said Michael Sullivan, spokesman for the state Department of the Environment.Traces of hazardous chemicals also were found in wells supplying three other homes in the neighborhood.Those wells are being resampled, along with those of 10 other homes nearby.

Thousands of chemicals are used in consumer products and a group of public health and environmental organizations gathered in the Inner Harbor Tuesday to rally for better oversight of them. The coalition called Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families formed outside the of the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel where chemical industry officials were holding a conference. The rally also comes ahead of debate in Congress over legislation to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, which hasn't been updated since 1976.

As millions of Americans head out for their annual Fourth of July fireworks, they might not realize the chemical that makes the shows so bright also poses an environmental threat. But researchers are developing new, greener pyrotechnics that already are being used at Disneyland and some indoor concerts. The new fireworks use alternatives to perchlorate, a salt that provides oxygen to the combustible elements in fireworks so they can burn. The chemical is considered particularly harmful to pregnant women and small children because of its ability to block absorption of iodine in the thyroid, a gland that controls metabolism and growth.

Spurred by a Nov. 24 derailment near Camden Yards, Maryland and CSX Transportation completed an agreement yesterday under which security officials will be given real-time access to information about hazardous cargoes moving through the state on freight trains. The agreement "will allow Maryland security and law enforcement officials to independently track the location of [CSX] trains and the contents of rail cars being handled by [CSX] trains across the state," said a railroad spokesman, Bob Sullivan.

Environmental Protection Agency officials said yesterday they will crack down on the owner of a Brooklyn Park plant where 50,000 gallons of hazardous chemicals are stored, after acids and toxic chemicals were found leaking from their tanks into the ground. The action against Consolidated Pharmaceuticals Inc., expected as early as next week, comes on the heels of a $100,000 fine levied by the the state for multiple hazardous-waste violations and a letter Monday from Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold that said the site poses the risk of a "potentially catastrophic fire."

An agency charged with overseeing land-use planning in the Washington region identified yesterday three possible routes to divert freight rail traffic -- including tankers containing hazardous chemicals -- away from the center of the nation's capital. A nine-month, $1 million feasibility study by the National Capital Planning Commission suggested two possible routes through Southern Maryland to Jessup and another that would run through a tunnel under the Anacostia section of Washington and into Prince George's County.

A CSX freight train with a tanker containing a hazardous chemical derailed early yesterday morning along the Patapsco River near the Carroll-Howard county line, prompting residents of 100 neighboring homes to briefly evacuate as a precaution. No one was injured in the accident, which occurred on the Carroll County side of the river in Marriottsville, fire officials said. CSX crews working with hazardous-materials teams had righted and inspected the tanker by about 7 last night, allowing residents to return home.

An emergency cleanup was under way yesterday at an abandoned paint factory in East Baltimore after federal and state environmental inspectors discovered thousands of drums, cans and vats of paint, solvents and other hazardous chemicals.Inspectors were still checking the former Ainsworth Paint and Chemical Co. at 3200 E. Biddle St. but had found only one drum that was leaking, said Quentin Banks, spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment.Left untended, however, the chemical stockpile is a fire and health hazard, said Peter H. Kostmayer, regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Companies that dump toxins in the water or pollute the air would face a tenfold increase in fines under proposals Gov. Parris N. Glendening has submitted to the General Assembly. The increases are part of the governor's environmental package, which includes bills to protect coastal bays from development, bolster drinking water standards and better monitor companies that store hazardous chemicals. Although the plan is less ambitious than some of his previous environmental initiatives, Glendening said he hopes the bills will cement his legacy as a governor who protected the environment.

CHICAGO - Levels of a chemical found in secondhand smoke has dropped sharply in Americans during the past decade, but children and blacks carry amounts that are twice as high as those in the overall population, according to a new federal report. The findings by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention muted encouraging news about a decline in levels of the chemical found in Americans of all ages. Measuring the effects of secondhand smoke was one of several goals of the CDC's sweeping report, which for the first time found widespread exposure to a group of chemicals found in common household insecticides.

Soil and groundwater sampling has turned up disturbing results in a boundary area of Aberdeen Proving Ground, where the hazardous chemical perchlorate has leached into the city of Aberdeen's drinking water supplies. Perchlorate, a rocket fuel additive used also in explosive devices such as grenades, has been found in patchy concentrations thousands of times higher than in previous discoveries - but not in the immediate area of the city's 11 wells - raising new questions about the unregulated contaminant and how it may be spreading.