Chemical Fire, Investment Boulevard

"The Day They Closed Down Apex"

Apex firefighters were faced with one of the most potentially dangerous incidents in the department's recent history, on the night of Thursday 10/5/06 (C-shift). Shortly after 9:30pm, Raleigh's dispatch center began receiving calls from citizens reporting an odor of chlorine and some kind of gas cloud in the area of Investment Boulevard and Schieffelin Road. Click HERE to listen to some of the initial 911 calls (courtesy of WRAL News). Raleigh telecommunicators determined that the calls were coming from Apex, and transferred the information to our dispatch center.

At 9:37pm on Thursday 10/5, Apex telecommunicators dispatched firefighters to an "odor investigation" and advised that callers had reported a possible chlorine leak and gas cloud in the area. As per our normal response protocol for an outside odor investigation, Engine 1 and Engine 3 responded. Though the Fire Chief (Car 1) does not typically respond on such "routine" calls, that night he did. Firefighters arrived to find a thick acrid haze blanketing the area. They were initially unsure where the cloud, which was by that time stretching across Schieffelin Road, was originating from, as visibility was significantly obscured. Car 1 assumed incident command, and a second alarm was struck, bringing additional Apex fire units (Engine 2, Tower 1) to the scene. With an 8mph wind blowing, and uncertainty as to what the cloud might contain, the primary concerns included the direction of travel of the plume and residents who were in its path. Wake County Emergency Management was notified and the reverse-911 system was put into use to notify residents of the emergency. Taking as input geographical areas, the reverse-911 system automatically calls phone numbers in those areas and delivers a pre-recorded message. Citizens in areas already blanketed by the cloud were told to shelter in place. Citizens in areas ahead of the cloud were urged to evacuate.

Photo at left by Thomas Babb
By this point, Apex Police Chief Jack Lewis and Town Manager Bruce Radford had arrived on scene. Several mutual aid departments, Raleigh's Hazardous Materials team, Wake County's Emergency Management and Public Safety departments, and EMS units were called for assistance. Law enforcement officials cordoned off an evacuation area bounded by Center Street, Salem Street and Highway 55. Two reconnaisance teams consisting of Apex firefighters were sent out on foot to locate the source of the cloud. One of the recon teams soon determined that a facility owned by The Environmental Quality Company (EQ) was on fire. Knowing that this was a storage facility for a variety of hazardous waste materials, Car 1 realized that personnel were staged too close to the hazard zone, and made the decision to relocate the command post to a safer area, the old Apex Electric site. The Raleigh Fire Department sent their mobile command center to the scene which provided staff with a multitude of facilities to help them plan and manage the rapidly expanding incident. Due to the hazardous chemicals and the potential threat they posed to responders, and the fact that putting water or foam on such materials may cause more harm to the environment than good, firefighters chose not to initiate a direct attack on the flames. As firefighters retreated, they witnessed the first of several massive explosions which sent fireballs soaring above the treetops. As one of the reconnaisance teams was now cut off from the staging area, Car 1 advised them to retreat out the back way. They made contact with citizens in nearby businesses and advised them initially to shelter in place. A short time later, a shift in the winds provided a window of opportunity which officials took advantage of to quickly evacuate those area businesses.

Photo at right by Lee Wilson
As the fire progressed, the night sky above the chemical plant glowed an eerie unnatural orangeish-red, caught in the photo at right. Explosions continued into the night - there were approximately 30 of them in all. Just a short time into the incident, Car 1 already anticipated that this would be a long-duration manpower-intensive event, and at 10:20pm all Apex firefighters received this short but ominous message on their digital pagers: "all firemen report to station one auth car 1". Shortly thereafter Station 1 which is located downtown on North Salem Street was overrun by the cloud, and all personnel standing by relocated to Station 3. But that safe haven too was short-lived, as the winds continued to push the plume further out. To add to the mix, weather reports indicated that a low pressure system had developed to the west of Apex, further exacerbating the wind problems. Just after 11pm, the evacuation zone was expanded yet again to include everything within the boundaries of US-1, Highway 55 and US-64. Nearly 17,000 residents were asked to leave their homes and businesses. Personnel at the police station, which is also home to our dispatch center, as well as Apex Fire Department's Station 3 which houses the Town of Apex's Emergency Operations Center (EOC), were given the order to make a hasty exit ahead of the plume. Firefighters packed up all of our apparatus and equipment and started a convoy to Apex Elementary School on Tingen Road, where we set up a secondary fire apparatus staging area in the lower parking lot, and the Town's EOC and an EMS and law enforcement staging area in the upper parking lot. We called into service a specialized communications vehicle operated by the NC Canine Emergency Response Team (CERT), part of our Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task force, which enabled the Apex dispatchers to continue fielding 911 calls and managing incident communications remotely from the elementary school parking lot without missing a beat.

Photo at left by Mike Legeros
The Wake County Health Department was called in to open and manage several facilities as shelters for displaced residents. Olive Chapel Elementary School, shown at left, was one of them - others included Turner Creek Elementary School and Green Hope High School. EMS and law enforcement units were sent to the shelters to assist citizens as they arrived. In their haste to get to safety, many residents left their homes with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. But according to Wake County Health Director Gibby Harris, the community rallied their support and many local businesses and residents who were not themselves evacuated offered donations and even opened their homes to displaced residents.

Photo at right by Thomas Babb
Most Apex residents who chose to follow the evacuation orders were able to transport themselves to area shelters, hotels, or friends' and families' houses. However the residents of one of our largest assisted living facilities were not so self-sufficient, as many were wheelchair-bound or bedridden. Firefighters from Apex and numerous other departments worked tirelessly for several hours throughout Thursday night and into Friday morning with EMS crews, nursing staff and transit workers to package every patient and load them one-by-one onto a fleet of CAT buses that then transported them to a local hospital. Many of the county's EMS units assisted - even those that did not respond to Apex helped in other ways by transporting patients and evacuees between area hospitals.

Initially every single fire department in the western part of Wake County along with several area EMS units were called for manpower. Ultimately, fire departments from throughout Wake County were asked to assist, and were rotated on approximately 6-hour shifts so as not to deplete resources all at once. At the height of the incident, there were about 300 firefighters on scene from Wake, Harnett, Orange and Durham County departments as well as the cities of Raleigh, Cary and Durham. Hazardous Materials Regional Response Teams (RRT) #3 (based in Durham) and #4 (based in Fayetteville) also sent personnel and equipment to supplement the 5 units from Raleigh Fire Department's hazardous materials team already on scene. The Apex Police Department received assistance from Wake County Sherriff's Office, NC State Highway Patrol, Cary PD, Raleigh PD, Durham City PD, Chapel Hill PD, Town of Fuquay-Varina PD, and officers from NC State University. Wake County's EOC as well as the state's EOC were activated in addition to the town's. A number of town, county, state and federal agencies helped to manage various aspects of the incident.

Photo at left by Mike Legeros
While fire and EMS personnel continued to assist with evacuations Thursday night, law enforcement officials took on the daunting task of shutting down all roads into Apex, which eventually included even the major state highways US-1, US-64 and Highway 55. CSX which provides rail transport through the town was shut down, and even the air space over the town was restricted. Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly declared a state of emergency, and for the first time I can recall, the Town of Apex was closed for business!

Photo at right by Lee Wilson
Anticipating the potential for run-off of toxic chemicals from the site, especially with the weather system moving in that was forecast to bring heavy rains, Apex firefighters donned full protective gear including breathing apparatus, and used backhoes and other heavy equipment provided by the Town to build an earthen berm all around the EQ site Thursday night. The hazardous materials teams set up a technical decontanimation site in the parking lot at the Department of Corrections where they could decon all personnel and equipment (including some civilians as well as emergency workers) that had been exposed to the chemical cloud. Hazmat technicians decked out in fully encapsulated suits used water and mild detergent with brushes to scrub away contaminants, and caught all the water run-off in large plastic tubs.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, around 4am, we were given a report that the winds had shifted once again and the cloud was heading towards our staging area on Tingen Road. Emergency workers packed up one more time and relocated to the parking lot of the old Winn Dixie supermarket on Laura Duncan Road. By sunrise on Friday 10/6, the once-peaceful parking lot was bustling with dozens of apparatus and hundreds of responders, and Bojangles which was located right next door was making a kiling on breakfast!

The NC Division of Environmental and Natural Resources (DENR), which consists of the Department of Waste Management, Division of Air Quality and Division of Water Quality, initially sent a 7-person team to Apex in the very early hours of Friday morning. As hazardous materials teams, who are equipped with fully encapsulated suits and breathing apparatus, monitored areas on the outer zones of the incident and determined them to be safe for non-protected entry, DENR personnel came in behind them and set up their own air monitors. Hazmat teams were first able to approach the incident site itself for reconnaissance later Friday morning. They found that the metal storage building where the chemicals were stored had collapsed, and that there were still three signifcant fires burning underneath the rubble. Barrels were scattered throughout the site. EQ hired an industrial firefighting force which is specially trained and equipped to handle this type of incident, and the NC State Highway Patrol escorted the team from Siler City to the site. This force worked together with hazardous materials teams and local firefighters to extinguish the remaining fires, which took a significant amount of time due to having to painstakenly remove debris in order to even get to them. At 12:23pm on Friday 10/6, the fire was officially declared extinguished. But officials wanted to ensure that air and water quality tests showed no contaminants before letting residents back into their homes and businesses.

By Saturday morning, air and water quality monitoring had been done by environmental agencies throughout much of the affected area, and test results so far showed nothing of concern in terms of contaminants that were tested for. At 8am on Saturday 10/7, nearly 36 hours after the initial incident dispatch, Town officials started lifting the barricades and began a phased re-entry of the affected areas. There were five phases of re-entry, shown in this map. Phases 1 and 2, furthest away from the EQ site, were opened to re-entry at 8am. Phases 3 and 4, a bit closer to the site, were opened at 9am. Phase 5 which encompassed the area closest to the EQ plant, remained closed until a bit later on Saturday so that more environmental testing could be completed. Incident command was terminated 5:09pm on Saturday 10/7, exactly 43 hours and 32 minutes after the initial dispatch. The property was turned over to the EPA and other agencies to begin the long process of investigation and clean-up.

Click HERE to view many more photos from the incident.