As nanoparticles increasingly make their way into consumer products and the environment, toxicologists want to understand their effects on human health. Ideally, they’d like to develop models that predict a material’s toxicity based on its chemical properties. Now a research team reports the first such model for metal oxide nanoparticles that uses the materials’ electrical and solubility properties (ACS Nano, DOI: 10.1021/nn3010087).
Metal oxide nanoparticles are semiconducting materials that drive oxidation and reduction reactions in devices such as fuel cells and electronics. Previous studies have linked the materials to health problems, such as inflammation in the lungs of welders who inhale fumes containing the compounds (Toxicol. Appl. Pharmacol., DOI: 10.1016/j.taap.2003.11.021).

FAIRFIELD -- A chlorine-based chemical was released from a Commerce Drive metal-processing business Thursday morning, triggering a hazmat response by emergency services, forcing the building to be evacuated and shutting down several nearby roads.

There were a few tense moments immediately after fumes were first reported to be wafting from the building at 10:35 a.m. at 515 Commerce Drive. Anticipating the fumes could be toxic, fire officials took precautions and ordered people out of the area.

But less than an hour later, Deputy Fire Chief Art Reid said the fumes from processing the chemical, gallium trichloride, were not considered toxic because of the small amounts released.

The incident took place at 5NPlus, a custom manufacturer of metals previously known as Metalspecialties, at 515 Commerce Drive.

"There was an over-pressurization of this chemical, and when this situation occurs it releases the excess into the atmosphere. It is an intentional process and last done last year," Reid said. "They are working at this time to cut it off and hope to have that done within an hour."

Roger Ngassan, general manager at 5NPlus, said as soon as the alarm sounded, employees left the building, as called for in the company's safety plan. It worked, he said, "perfectly."

Cayce Department of Public Safety crews responded to a fire at a steel plant Thursday morning.
Several aluminum-manganese alloy briquettes caught fire Friday morning at a Commercial Metal Co. warehouse off 12th Street Extension before noon, said the company’s Jeff Adams.
At least one firetruck responded to put out the blaze. No one was injured in the incident, and crews were cleaning the area up by 1 p.m. It is unknown how the fire started, Adams said.

A fire at a closed metal works plant in Ft. Wayne, IN sent a column of black and grey smoke skyward to be seen for miles. No homes were evacuated on the city’s east side. The defunct plant has been undergoing a costly cleanup of contaminated soil and groundwater. Plans, which were approved in 2010 after a more than four-year process, called for the removal of contaminated soil from seven areas on the plant property. 


Also, wells were to be dug to draw out and treat the groundwater, and to draw vapors from the soil. Despite this history of environmental problems and the plant’s past use of hazardous chemicals, city fire marshal said evacuations of nearby homes were not necessary. A hazardous materials crew was monitoring air quality downwind of the fire, and the city water department tested the runoff created by the fire department’s hoses. 

China detained seven people in connection with a toxic metal spill in Guangxi province that contaminated a tributary of the Pearl River and threatened water for 1.5 million people, according to a local official.
All seven were executives at chemical plants, the official Xinhua News Agency reported late yesterday, citing Feng Zhennian, an official with the regional environmental protection department. Feng didn’t identify the executives, Xinhua said.
Chinese workers have dumped chemicals to contain the cadmium spill, detected Jan. 15 upstream of the city of Hechi, which killed fish and prompted panic buying of bottled water. Lead poisoning from battery makers, fluoride leaks from solar panel plants and acid spills from mines have sparked outrage in China, as three decades of growth transformed the nation into the world’s second-biggest economy and its largest polluter.

Aledo, Ill. —
An early morning fire on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012 at MMF2, the nickel plating plant owned by Bruce Meminger could have been a lot worse. "Luckily no one was hurt,' said Trent Kaufman, a chemist working for Meminger. He was the staff person on call that day. He arrived after receiving a call and noted that the fire department was already there.  "It's already been a long day," he added at around 9 a.m.

A 9,000 square foot building used for nickel plating was the building in question. The fire was called into 911 by a Meminger Metal Finishing employee who noticed heavy smoke billowing from the MMF2 building located in the industrial park complex. The two remain zinc plating operations in Aledo were not affected. The call came in to the Mercer County Sheriff dispatcher at 3:39 a.m. Thursday and brought out 22 of the 25 Aledo Protection District fire fighters. The Viola Fire Department and AMT ambulance were also called to the scene for mutual assistance.

ANDERSON COUNTY — Federal environmental workers hoped to finish cleaning a crude lab site near Hartwell Lake by Christmas, but the discovery of yet another chemical element on the property will keep them cleaning until at least mid-February.

Cadmium, a bluish-white metal, has been found in the soil behind the site’s “main lab” — a leaky old warehouse where a man in his 70s told authorities he was trying to make organic fuel.

The makeshift chemistry lab near Interstate 85 in Anderson has yielded 946 containers of chemicals since it was discovered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in June, six months after a worker from the state health department investigated a complaint in the same neighborhood and reported that she could find no problems.

Chemicals were found in hundreds of jars, bottles, tubs and drums on the property. Some of those chemicals, including arsenic and now the carcinogen cadmium, have been found in the soil surrounding the lake.Benjamin Franco, the Environmental Protection Agency’s on-scene coordinator of the cleanup, said the presence of cadmium in the soil will affect how workers can dispose of the dirt.

The building was evacuated when the Clayton hazardous materials response team arrived at 8:44 p.m. The team, consisting of seven fire trucks and an ambulance, left the scene at 10:37 p.m. Meanwhile, police officers rerouted all traffic around the building.

The incident occurred after a graduate student mixed 30mL of lithium, dibromo-o-xylene and tetrahydrofuran in a 50mL flask on a bench top instead of under a fume hood. The top came off the flask and vapor came out, irritating the student’s eyes, Backus said. According to Backus, other people nearby pulled the fire alarm and recommended the building be evacuated and ventilation systems turned off.

“My staffer there went in and the only concern we had after vapors had been dissipated was the trace amount of lithium might be present, since that’s a reactive metal,” Backus said. “We just covered areas of the flask with oil, which smothered it, sealed up lab, [and] cleaned up [the] next day.”

“To go to Berkeley Pit Lake, you have to complete a forty-hour Hazmat program—and that’s just to stand next to the water,” advises Andrea Stierle, a research professor at the University of Montana-Missoula, who began studying samples from the Pit sixteen years ago. And when employees of the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology venture out onto the lake, they do so in a boat that’s made of fiberglass (as opposed to aluminum), “because they don’t want it to dissolve before they get back to shore,” she continues. It’s probably best that the privately-owned Berkeley Pit—a mile by a mile-and-a-half across, and encircled by a barbed-wire fence—is off-limits to all but a select few. After all, it’s an abandoned open pit copper mine filled with an estimated forty billion gallons of acidic, metal-contaminated water—part of the largest Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site in the United States, and an ongoing liability for its “responsible parties,” the Atlantic Richfield Company (which merged into British Petroleum) and Montana Resources.

A chemical blaze took hold in the Technical University in Graz, Austria yesterday (Tues), causing almost 80,000 Euros worth of damage. According to the fire department, the metal initially set alight could be extinguished with water.

The emergency services were automatically alerted to the fire in the "New Chemistry" building at the university on Tuesday afternoon. During an experiment in the laboratory some lithium caught fire and was in real danger of exploding. Once alight however the metal could not be extinguished with water and the fire began to spread. By the time the fire brigade had arrived, the majority of the lab was on fire.

The entire institute was evacuated whilst 28 firemen worked to get the blaze under control. It was eventually extinguished after two hours but work continued through the night to secure the laboratory and ensure its safety. The damage caused is predicted to cost the university between 60,000 and 80,000 Euros.

The Cassville Volunteer Fire Company and Jackson Mills Volunteer Fire Company were dispatched to Jackson Memorial High School for a fire alarm activation at 12:49 PM.
According to Cassville’s Assistant Chief Adam Poppe, who was the incident commander, when the first apparatus arrived on location it was reported to them that there was a heavy smoke condition in the “C” Wing of the Reider Building of the high school complex. Crews entered the building to investigate and confirmed a smoke condition in the building but no fire.
According to Allison Erwin, Coordinator of Communications for the Jackson Board of Education, the smoke condition was caused from a science experiment gone awry.  Chief Poppe stated that a teacher was demonstrating the reaction of  sodium metals to water and when a sodium metal was placed in water to create sodium hydroxide  it created more smoke than the ventilation fans in the lab could handle and created a smoke condition in the building.
All of the students of the high school were evacuated out of the building when the fire alarm sounded.  After the the fire companies were on-scene and able to deem the areas safe, students from the Clayton Building were allowed to return to their classrooms and students from the Reider Building were moved into the Fine Arts building to await the all clear from the fire department to return to to their classrooms.
As firefighters tried to determine how hazardous the smoke may be from the chemical reaction, they sought out the science teacher and looked to locate the Material Safety Data Sheets (also called MSDS sheets) from the teacher on the chemicals used in the experiments but according to Chief Poppe, the teacher informed them that the MSDS Sheets were removed from the classroom earlier in the year to be updated and had not yet been returned.
Without information as to the toxicity of the chemical reaction Chief Poppe notified the Berkeley Haz-Mat Team, that Department handles Hazardous Materials incidents for Ocean County, and requested a response from them.  He also had the Jackson OEM Coordinator, Barry Olejarz, and the Fire Official for Fire Districts #1, 2 and 3, Frank McDonald, respond to the scene.  Additionally, Poppe had one engine from Whitesville Fire Company respond to assist with fans and manpower to assist in ventilation the fire.

SEVIERVILLE — Firefighters and a hazardous materials cleanup crew were called to the TRW plant on River Road Tuesday afternoon after a fire at the facility.

Officials said there were no injuries at the facility when flames erupted from a large metal trash bin holding oily filters from inside the plant.

“We had a dumpster fire on the exterior of the building,” said Capt. Steve Whaley of the Sevier County Volunteer Fire Department. “We ended up having a little bit of a (hazardous materials) issue.”

Fires can ignite where the filters are stored because the oil is sometimes still hot when it’s placed in the container, he explained.

Three workers at a York County company suffered chemical burns after an explosion on Thursday morning.
Around 8:30 a.m., an employee of SKF USA Inc. in Penn Township and two contractors suffered respiratory burns while working with a salt solution that is used to treat metal.

Fairfield, Conn. (WTNH) - A Fairfield company is expected to open as usual today after an early morning hazardous materials incident.

Fairfield firefighters were called to 5N Plus on Commerce Drive just after midnight. The company produces specialty metal and chemical products.

The fire chief tells News 8 there was a chemical reaction. An employee responded and thought he fixed the problem, unaware there was a second chemical reaction also occuring.

The scene was cleared shortly after 3:30 a.m. and the company will be able to open today.

One firefighter was treated for possible exposure to chemical vapors. He got a clean bill of health and was back on the job in the morning.

LOWELL — Excavators began pushing the shell of the front part of Rieter Automotive onto itself at about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in an effort to extinguish what was left of the blaze that gutted the former auto parts plant.

At one point early in the blaze flames shot a couple stories into the air as firefighters on four ladder trucks shot streams into the burning building. A portion of the wall on the east side of the structure collapsed onto the CSX railroad tracks. Trains were rerouted shortly after the fire began, according to officials.

Jim Watkins, who had worked for Rieter for 28 years, was one of 12 workers for BRT Indiana LLC inside the building when the fire started shortly before noon. All 12 of the workers escaped uninjured.

He said he was part of a construction crew working for the new owner — De Pere, Wis.-based trucking company WEL Companies Inc. — to scrap the materials inside the structure before parts of it were to be razed. WEL purchased the building about a month ago. A portion of the building was expected to be used as a warehouse. They were about a month into the job.

“We were just burning some metal and it caught on fire and went up through the roof,” Watkins said.

In Lancaster County a contractor working on a home landed on a gold mine of dangerous chemicals.

The contractor contacted the fire department which called Hazmat and the DEP.

It turned out that the chemicals were for an internet company that informs people how to test ground and well water for gold and other precious metals.

The chemicals were used to test samples customers sent to the company.

We're told the home owner is being very cooperative about the clean up which will take place sometime early next week. The house is currently condemned.

GALLATIN, Tenn. (AP) — Three workers have been critically burned in an explosion at a Middle Tennessee chemical plant, and federal investigators are on their way to the scene.

The Friday morning accident that injured five total is the third this year at the Hoeganaes (HAY'-gan-eez) Corp. plant where a January flash fire killed a worker. The Gallatin facility makes metal powders and the two previous accidents occurred after flammable dust accumulated in the air and combusted.

The plant already was under investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. An investigator criticized the company two weeks ago for not adequately addressing the danger posed by the dust.

A fire at Donsco Inc. in Wrightsville Monday night caused an estimated $150,000 in damages, a fire official said.
Wrightsville Fire Chief Fred Smeltzer Sr. said molten iron burned out the bottom of a smelting furnace, causing 10 tons of iron to leak onto the foundry floor.
The iron then burned through hydraulic lines, setting leaking oil alight, Smeltzer said.
Flames reached the ceiling at one point, he said.
Firefighters had to use a chemical fire suppressant on the blaze because of the reaction water has with molten metal, Smeltzer said.
When water comes into contact with super-heated metals, it causes an explosion from the water turning to steam at a fast rate. The explosion sprays steam, boiling water and metals.
No one was injured in the blaze, which was reported about 10:50 p.m.

Firefighters put out a blaze at Arizona Chemical Friday afternoon.

The incident began with an explosion at a metal corrugated tall oil upgrade facility at the plant at about 4:30 p.m., officials said. The fire was out by 5:15 p.m. No one was injured in the incident officials said.

"It was pretty involved initially," said Charlie Snelling, the manager of human resources at the plant. 

The fire at the sent out large, thick black plumes of smoke into the afternoon air. 

"We don't know how the fire started," Snelling said. He also described the building as the place where workers refine the materials they use at the plant.

A truck carrying chemicals caught fire at Chandani chowk early on Thursday. Two firemen were injured in the extinguishing operation. Traffic on both the sides of the highway was disrupted for nearly three-and-a-half hours.

Fire brigade officers said the incident took place around 4 am. “

“The truck was carrying metal containers of acrylic polymer, hydrogen peroxide, phosphoric acid, zinc chloride and calcium chloride. There were also some bundles of ropes and utensils in the truck,” said Prabhakar Umratkar, a station officer with the fire brigade.

He added, “The incident came to light after some of the passengers in the vehicle following the truck saw fumes coming out. We reached the spot in 10 minutes after we got the call. It took about two hours for our 20 member of fire brigade team to bring the fire under control. We had to be extra cautious while extinguishing the fire. Two of the firemen suffered minor injuries.” The traffic on both the sides was dirupted, he said.

WEST POTTSGROVE — A manufacturing process became hazardous for a short time Thursday morning when fumes overwhelmed an air scrubber and were released into the atmosphere above Pottsgrove Metal Finishers.

According to Assistant Fire Chief Andy Mitz of the West End Fire Company, emergency officials were alerted to the situation around 8:08 a.m. When they arrived on scene, they closed down the roads around the business for about an hour as a precaution while waiting for the Montgomery County Hazmat unit to arrive, which they had called. They also asked some residents around the business to close their windows.

FIRE investigators were today still trying to discover what caused a factory blaze in Northampton during the Easter holiday.

Four crews of firefighters were needed to tackle the severe fire at Expert Developments, in Bective Road, Kingsthorpe, after it was spotted at about 7pm on Easter Sunday.

An employee at the metal finishing firm was nearby and spotted the smoke, arriving in time to warn firefighters that there were chemicals kept on site.

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - The release of a hazardous material inside Emcore Corporation Friday morning brought fire units to the southeast Albuquerque plant and sent one employee to a hospital.

The Albuquerque Fire Department reported a "small amount of particulate metal" was released into the air about 11 a.m. with two employees possibly inhaling the substance.

AFD medics evaluated the two employees with one being sent to Lovelace Hospital for observation.

The high-tech manufacturing plant at Eubank Boulevard SE and Research Road produces components used with fiber optics and solar photovoltaics..

One person was injured in a flash fire Tuesday afternoon at Hoeganaes Corporation on Airport Road in Gallatin, a plant that produces powdered metal products, according to the Gallatin Fire Department.

This is the second such flash fire at the facility since January. First responders were dispatched to the scene at 2 p.m.

One person sustained burns in the accident and was transported to a nearby hospital, according to fire department officials. The injuries sustained were not significant, according to Fire Chief Billy Crook.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a federal agency tasked with investigating industrial incidents, is investigating both incidents, according to the board’s website.
On Wednesday, March 30, the board announced it will send a team back into Gallatin to investigate the new incident.

One person was injured in a flash fire at Hoeganaes Corporation on Airport Road in Gallatin, a plant that produces powdered metal products, according to the Gallatin Fire Department. This is the second such flash fire at the facility since January.

First responders were dispatched to the scene at 2 p.m.

One person sustained burns in the accident and was transported to a nearby hospital, according to fire department officials.

The identity of the person burned, the severity of the injuries and the hospital to which the person was transported have not been released as of Tuesday evening.

Firefighters said they heard several explosions coming from the building. Fire crews had their hands full as heavy flames and smoke could be seen for miles. However, firefighters were unable to enter the building because of the possibility of chemical concerns from what was in the plant.
The business recycles and processes metals.

BOYERTOWN — An investigation is under way to determine what caused a Wednesday morning fire at a Boyertown metal manufacturing plant on County Line Road.

Emergency responders were dispatched to Cabot Inc. for a blaze that broke out in a chemical dust collector shortly before 10:30 a.m.

Tim Knapp, manager of safety, health and environment for Cabot, said crews had the fire controlled and out within five minutes after arriving on the scene, giving an all-clear around 11 a.m.

The dust collector where the fire began contained Tantalum, a chemical used in the company’s metal manufacturing process, he said. Although it was initially thought dust had escaped the plant during the fire, Knapp said it was only smoke, not chemicals that were released into the air.

No one was injured during the fire and employees were evacuated from the building adjacent to the dust collector, he said.

TUCSON, AZ (KOLD) - An explosive combination resulted in the evacuation of at least twenty employees at the Gerome Maturating facility, located on 36th Street near Palo Verde.

One worker risked his own safety and tried putting out the fire, says Gerome's supervisor, Julio Valdez.

"He was trying to extinguish the flames with the fire extinguisher, I guess he got too close; he inhaled some of the smoke," Valdez said.

That employee was treated and released.

Sixteen others were evaluated on scene while eight fire fighters also were seen by medical personal., one of whom went to the hospital for further evaluation.

Tucson Fire Captain Brain Delf says the hazmat situation could have been much worse, because the metals inside the drum were toxic and highly explosive.

"Powder aluminum, powder magnesium those are a couple of things you would find in fireworks," Delf said.

The fire was contained inside a fifty-five gallon steel drum.

Fire crews couldn't do much in this case but wait for hours until the fire put its self out.  

"With metal fires we can't use water or anything that is going to take humidity even form the air to try to extinguish it or cool the metals or it will explode," Delf said.