CHARLESTON, W.Va. –The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is ordering Peoples Cartage to develop and implement a detailed cleanup and remediation plan for its Wood County warehouse following this week’s fire.
The fire at the company’s warehouse on Camden Avenue in Parkersburg was first reported Sunday morning.
Local fire crews, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency responded to the scene. The fire was extinguished late Tuesday.
DEP spokesperson Terry Fletcher told MetroNews the cleanup is now in the hands of the responsible party, though the agency plans to remain on site.
“We’re going to be looking at doing characterization, and removal of debris, assessing the site, looking at sampling and things like that, and then installing controls to make sure that there’s no runoff or impacts to water while that remediation is ongoing,” Fletcher said.
According to a DEP release issued Thursday, the agency will be responsible for in-stream sampling in the Little Kanawha River.
The release states that the DEP has ordered Peoples Cartage to submit plans for debris removal and disposal, site characterization and sampling, and remediation of any areas where contamination exceeds applicable regulatory limits. Each plan must also include a timeline for completing the required work.
Fletcher said the company will hire an environmental contractor to oversee the cleanup, which he said is standard practice for incidents like this.
“A lot of those we’re familiar with and have had history with, so we understand how those kind of firms work and what they’re capable of and those kinds of things, so they’ll be bringing somebody in and they’ll be walking through on the early phases on what needs to be done and we’ll be working with them to make sure it’s done completely,” he said.
While the required plans are being developed and reviewed, the company is authorized to continue its cleanup and remediation efforts.
The DEP will review and approve the submitted plans.
Fletcher said the DEP will establish deadlines to ensure the work is completed in a timely manner.
“We’ll be making sure that there’s timelines in place here that they have to keep up with and make sure that this is not something that is going to linger, they’ll have certain timeframes they’ll have to meet with each of the different phases and activities that they’ll be required to do,” he said.
Fletcher said air and water quality levels have remained normal since elevated particulate matter was detected just north of the site Monday, prompting a shelter-in-place order that was lifted the following day.
“Outside of that we haven’t seen any elevated levels of concern from the event so now that the smokes been put out the EPA felt that it was appropriate to take down those monitoring’s, it’s not needed right now, but they’re certainly ready to implement those again if conditions were to arise that needed that,” he said.
The release also states that the West Virginia Department of Agriculture is continuing to collect information through its online portal from farmers, gardeners and agricultural producers who believe their operations may have been affected by debris from the fire.