Environment Agency shows teeth over ICI spills
15 Jan 2000
In a rare show of its teeth, the Environment Agency has carpeted ICI over a catalogue of mishaps at its Runcorn and Teesside sites. After five spillages since last July, the Agency demanded a high-level meeting with ICI, and extracted abject apologies and a plan to improve the company's attitude.
ICI was already in trouble even before the meeting. Three mishaps at Runcorn - a spillage of 320kg of ethylene dichloride last July, which lead to a prosecution and £15 000 fine; an escape of effluent from vinylidene chloride production in October; and a 150tonne spillage of chloroform this April - led the Agency to set up a `multidiscliplinary investigation team' to review the site's environmental management systems. Two days after this was announced, 50 tonnes of trichloroethane was spilt at Runcorn, running through surface drains into the Weston Canal, where it sank to the bottom. Mere hours later, the North Tees site reported a spillage of `several hundred tonnes' of liquid naphtha, generating a large plume of the volatile hydrocarbon which resulted in road closures. None of the liquid naphtha escaped from the site. At this point, the Agency demanded to know what had gone wrong - and what ICI planned to do to prevent further spills.
At the meeting, the chief executive of ICI Chemicals and Polymers (C&P), Adrian Bromley, and the group's health, safety and environment director, Richard Stillwell, expressed `sincere and unconditional apologies' to EA director of operations Archie Robertson and regional general manager Ian Handyside.
C&P is setting up an environmental task force to identify the causes of the incidents, reported Bromley. Other measures include the reporting of all spillages to Bromley within 24 hours; monthly site meetings to report progress of environmental audit actions and ensure maintenance is up to date.
Even this wasn't enough for the EA. Robertson ordered that ICI extend these measures to all its sites, to strengthen reporting of `near miss' incidents, review the capital and maintenance programmes to focus on spill prevention, and improve the `general housekeeping' at Runcorn. Moreover, the company has agreed to an independent review of the causes of the spillages, to be organised with the EA. `I want to see improvements implemented more widely than at Runcorn,' commented Robertson. `I want to see a change in attitude across the company.'
The events are a severe embarrassment for ICI, which has been trumpeting a new environmental strategy based on the `burden' that individual pollutants put on the environment. Bromley conceded that the approach at Runcorn was not up to scratch: `We must redouble our efforts to ensure that our operations are conducted safely.'
