Toledo Fire & Rescue ordered everyone within a mile of 1266 Progress Ave. in North Toledo, Ohio, to leave at 10:48 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 20, after glycidyl methacrylate began escaping from a 5,500-gallon tank at the MC Tank terminal, according to the City of Toledo. The next day, Stellantis canceled both shifts at the Toledo Jeep complex that builds the Wrangler, spokesperson Jodi Tinson told the Detroit Free Press.
The documents describe a leak at a nearby business. None of the ones I reviewed reports damage at the plant. The north complex was evacuated Tuesday night, Tinson said, and the Wednesday first shift was canceled. Stellantis confirmed around 2 p.m. that second shift was gone too. The south plant sat outside the evacuation zone but inside the 3-mile shelter-in-place area, and Tinson said it was not running that week. The line stopped because the fire department drew circles on a map and the plant landed inside them.
The Toledo Chemical Leak, Hour by Hour
The city’s release says the one-mile evacuation was ordered because of explosion risk. At 4:24 a.m. Wednesday, the city added a 3-mile shelter-in-place order based on preliminary plume modeling. It lifted that order at 5 p.m. Wednesday and cut the evacuation zone to a half-mile. The zone shrank to a quarter-mile at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, the tank stopped releasing at 6 p.m. Thursday, and the evacuation ended Friday, Oct. 23. The Free Press reported that the department first told about 300 residents within a half-mile to leave, then widened the order to a mile.
The two orders are different tools. Evacuation moves people out of the area where fire or explosion is the worry. Shelter-in-place, as 13abc reported the instructions, keeps people indoors with windows and doors shut and ventilation that pulls in outside air turned off, which is the answer to a plume that might drift. EPA’s response page says the agency was asked to help around midnight, reached the scene at 2:30 a.m., and requested air modeling to inform the evacuation decisions. The city’s release does not say how many people lived inside it.
Why Firefighters Let the Tank Finish Reacting
By about 10 a.m. Wednesday, containment attempts had failed, EPA says. The tank was compromised and the chemical was reacting, and the city chose to let the reaction run its course. The release lasted nearly 48 hours. TFRD Battalion Chief Tony Santiago told 13abc, “Unfortunately, this is something that takes time and monitoring changing conditions.”…