A review of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Research Program on the prevention and control of hazardous material spills

Abstract

This paper is a status report on a number of the projects in progress at the Industrial Waste Treatment Research Laboratory of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at Edison, New Jersey. The actual causes of numerous hazardous material spills have been documented and analyzed to assign priority to operational areas in which spill prevention and control procedures are urgently needed. Spill alert systems are ready for installation on marginally safe earthen holding pond dikes. Fail-safe systems are being evaluated to reduce spillage from overfilling and from transfer line rupture. The handling of spills in municipalities has been addressed with particular attention to the maintenance and utilization of secondary sewage treatment facilities during spill events. Among the physical and chemical treatment systems that have been or are being produced are trailer-mounted units for processing contaminated water. Also, special devices are being designed for the dispersion and recovery — where necessary — of adsorbents and counteractive chemical reagents for in situ treatment of polluted water bodies. Plastic foams have been developed to dike or confine spills and to plug leaks in ruptured containers. A pickup truck-mounted collection unit, consisting of a battery-powered pump and a self-deploying plastic storage bag, has been constructed and tested. Nearing final testing is a “Sea Curtain”, which extends from the bottom of a stream to the air above. The “Curtain” can be used to isolate a water column that is being contaminated by a soluble, sinking, or floating hazardous material discharged from shore or in stream. Gelling and solidification agents have been shown to be effective in immobilizing spilled hazardous materials. Systems are being built to reprocess treatment agents for reuse and to detoxify whatever agents or recovered materials cannot be salvaged. Field-use packets and other easy-to-deploy items are being developed to trace spills in water and to assess the effectiveness of cleanup. Procedures for enhanced, in-place, biological degradation of spilled hazardous materials are under test. The thrust of the Laboratory's program in these and in related projects is toward the demonstration of practical procedures, hardware, and suitably engineered systems for the prevention and control of spills of hazardous materials.