The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced recently that Gardner-Gibson, Inc. paid a $650,000 penalty for a 2015 spill of hot asphalt that threatened Commencement Bay and other violations of the Clean Waters Act.
EPA announced the resolution of the violations on its website Jan. 6. The company, which manufactures asphalt shingles and coating materials, was cited for a February 2015 incident in which 60,000 gallons of hot liquid asphalt spilled from an open valve and into a ditch, threatening a waterway and the bay, according to the announcement. Follow-up inspections at the facility revealed additional "significant" violations at the facility, EPA reports.
"This facility failed to comply with spill prevention and containment requirements and ended up with a mess -- and a stiff penalty,' Ed Kowalski,director of EPA Region 10’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, said in the announcement. "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."
Violations of the Clean Water Act's Spill Prevention Controls and Countermeasures requirements included failure to maintain secondary equipment in the event of a spill; failure to determine and carry out appropriate inspections of various above-ground 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, according to EPA.
The spill got into the Lincoln Ave. Ditch and stopped about 800 feet from the the Blair Water, which flows into Commencement Bay, EPA reports. Four ducks were contaminated with the asphalt and were captured, cleaned, and released, EPA reports..
The $650,000 penalty was deposited into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, a fund used by federal agencies to respond to discharges of oil and hazardous substances, according to the announcement.
