HAZARDOUS: MATERIALS TRANSPORTED THROUGH REGION POSE DANGERS TO PUBLIC AND EMERGENCY TEAMS

The list of incidents involving hazardous materials that affect the lives of Southeast Missouri residents grows longer each day.

A fire Tuesday at Sikeston Creosoting sent carcinogenic materials into the air and could have contaminated the water supply of 18 residents in the Vanduser area.

Emergency response personnel evacuated 75 people from their homes Monday for more than two hours after a fertilizer spill in Delta.

A train derailment last month near Lone Star Industries spilled diesel fuel and phosphoric acid.

Inspectors have been monitoring the site where leaky underground storage tanks in Cape Girardeau were removed about five years ago near the entrance to Arena Park, said Mike Morgan, a fire inspector with the Cape Girardeau Fire Department. The ground is still being tested for contaminants because of the extent of the leak.

Jackson Bostic, a Missouri Department of Natural Resources environmental emergency specialist out of Poplar Bluff, said underground tanks are a big issue statewide.

"There's probably 5,000 known leaking underground storage tanks in Missouri right now," Bostic said. "At this time, about 2,500 of them have been dealt with. They find them every day."

That is not the only way in which hazardous materials are released into the environment.

Bostic said the Sikeston Creosoting fire produced a low-lying smoke that was more toxic than the smoke produced from a tire fire that burned for 14 hours in Malden earlier this year.

Bostic said residents living near the plant were evacuated in time and the smoke dissipated. He said there should not be any long-term health hazards from the smoke.

To douse the flame, firefighters dumped about half-a-million gallons of water on the site. Bostic said that water spread the creosote oil and let it soak into a groundwater table that is only about five feet under the surface. That is within close proximity of 18 residential wells that are sunk about 25 feet into the ground.

Bostic said those wells will have to be monitored for contaminants. "This has some major environmental impact," he said.

The owners of the plant have been cooperating completely with DNR's cleanup criteria, Bostic said.

Statistically, Southeast Missouri ranks fairly low in the number of hazardous material incidents. Within the 24-county region though, Cape Girardeau County ranked third in 1996 with 20 accidents the DNR responded to. St. Francois County was second with 21, and Washington County first with 77.

Bostic said Cape Girardeau and St. Francois counties ranked high because of their proximity to Interstate 55.

Petroleum was the top material involved in spills in 1996 and 9.8 percent of hazardous material spills were from highway accidents, according to DNR reports.

The number of accidents that involved dangerously toxic hazardous waste "that could kill you instantly if you got involved in it" was a small percentage of what the DNR worked in 1996, Bostic said.

He said there were 259 intentional hazardous material spills last year.

"It's a little staggering in this day and time that people would actually do this," he said. "Sometimes people think it's cheaper for them to go ahead and dump the material in a creek or in the ground or try to hide it."

If they get caught, he added, the fine is often cheaper than the cost of cleaning the spill. "It's very costly to get rid of chemicals these days so they just dump them rather than do it right."