Tacoma company fined by EPA for 2015 hot asphalt spill near Commencement Bay
A manufacturing company at Port of Tacoma has paid a $650,000 penalty after spilling 60,000 gallons of hot, liquid asphalt from its facility in 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday.
Gardner-Gibson, Inc. paid the fine to resolve violations of the Clean Water Act after the spill from its Gardner-Fields, Inc. facility located off Taylor Way. The facility makes asphalt shingles and coating materials.
A spokesperson for Gardner-Gibson, Inc., based out of Tampa, Florida, could not immediately be reached by phone Thursday.
The spill occurred Feb. 8, 2015, when employees were transferring hot asphalt from rail cars to a storage tank. The connector to the tank separated, spilling asphalt in the Lincoln Avenue Ditch, which flows into the Blair Waterway in Commencement Bay.
The asphalt spill stopped about 800 feet from Blair Waterway, according to the EPA.
Four ducks were contaminated with the asphalt and were captured, cleaned and released.
The EPA cited the company for significant violations of the Clean Water Act’s Spill, Prevention, Control, and Countermeasures (SPCC) requirements after follow-up inspections at the facility.
“SPCC requirements are intended to prevent discharges of oil from non-transportation-related onshore facilities and to facilitate responses if discharges occur. The requirements apply to all facilities where a potential spill could reach waters of the United States and that maintain above-ground oil storage capacity of greater than 1,320 gallons of oil or total below-ground storage capacity of greater than 42,000 gallons of oil,” according to the EPA.
When inspected, the facility had more than 4 million gallons of storage capacity.
Among the SPCC violations:
Failure to maintain appropriate secondary containment in the event of a spill;
Failure to determine and carry out appropriate inspections of various aboveground storage tanks;
Failure to identify appropriate qualifications for personnel performing tank integrity testing; and
Failure to prepare and submit a Facility Response Plan to EPA after the spill.
“This facility failed to comply with spill prevention and containment requirements and ended up with a mess — and a stiff penalty,” said Ed Kowalski, director of EPA Region 10’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division. “But they and the environment dodged a bullet here — with the capacity to store over 4 million gallons of petroleum products it could have been much worse.”
The penalty was deposited in to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, used by federal agencies to respond to spills of oil or other hazardous substances.
