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A chemical spill burned a swatch of grass on the shoulder of Sunrise Highway, closing one of its lanes Wednesday morning.
Fire Marshal Chris Hansen begins to inspect container found at the site of a chemical spill off Sunrise Highway.
A chemical spill closed one of the eastbound lanes of Sunrise Highway near Exit 64 in East Quogue on Wednesday morning, September 15. The spill was observed by a passing motorist at around 8:30 a.m., and just by coincidence he’s the head of public safety for the Town of Southampton.
“I was the passing motorist,” Public Safety Emergency Management Administrator Ryan Murphy said. On his way east to work, he said, “I observed what appeared to be a burnt out area of vegetation on the side of the road and a white container on the ground.”
Pulling over to better assess the situation, Mr. Murphy took note of remnants of a corrosive label on the container. He contacted the town Fire Marshals office, which deployed to the site with a Haz-Mat team.
The lane was closed down and the town’s new Haz-Mat truck arrived to attempt to discern the nature of the spill. A $100,000 meter the town was given by Suffolk County was used, but its results were inconclusive. “Then we tested it with old fashioned pH paper,” Mr. Ryan related.
Thee tests showed the chemical in the container was an acidic substance. “It came up as a very strong acidic substance,” Mr. Murphy said, explaining it was easy to deduce the brown vegetation was “burned” by the acid.
The container was a 5 gallon size, but the administrator doubts more than a half-gallon spilled, based on the size of the burned out patch of grass. The good news, he said, is that the rain in the forecast will be adequate to dilute the spill.
“The solution for acid is to drown it out, so the rain should handle it from here on,” he said.
When the spill occurred will likely remain a mystery. The container may have fallen out of a truck. “There were tire tracks going right through the spill,” he informed. It looks like somebody went off the road and the thing must have fallen off the back of it,” Mr. Murphy said. It appears as if the spill happened sometime between late Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning; Mr. Murphy didn’t recall seeing the brown patch during his commute Tuesday.
The State Department of Environmental Conservation was alerted to the spill and police reported the lane was reopened within two hours.
