Some residents east of Atlanta were evacuated while others were told to shelter in place Sunday to avoid contaminants from a chemical plant fire that sent a massive plume of dark smoke high into the sky that could be seen from miles away.
Interstate 20 was shut down in both directions in the area, the Georgia Department of Transportation said in a post on X. Reports said traffic was snarled as vehicles backed up in the area after the closure.
The fire ignited when a sprinkler head malfunctioned around 5 a.m. Sunday at the BioLab plant in Conyers, Rockdale County Fire Chief Marian McDaniel told reporters. The malfunction caused water to mix with a water-reactive chemical, producing a plume of chemicals.
I’m just some random person on the internet, but shouldn’t their fire system be non-water based if they’re working with water reactive chemicals. This plus the sprinkler failing makes me think this was totally preventable and likely due to negligence, probably to save money if I had to guess.
I’ve done some (grunt-level) work in chemical packaging. I didn’t see in the article if it specifies, but the place I worked handled tons of different types of chemicals and they’d all have their own precautions needed. If this place was the same (big if), the sprinklers are probably standard for fire, and the chemical in question should be delivered sealed in watertight drums and only opened/handled inside a small room-sized fume hood. We had specialized rooms for things like spontaneously combustible chemicals and poisonous inhalation hazards — those chemicals were never unsealed outside those rooms.
All that goes out the window I assume if this is the only chemical they handle.
