Water Treatment Plant - Executive Summary |
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The management of the Roanoke Rapids Sanitary District has a sincere concern for the welfare and safety of all employees and the public they serve. The District will give safety precedence over the operational expediency of short cuts and will comply with the OSHA and other pertinent safety laws. Chemical safety takes a top priority within this organization. An Emergency Response Team has been established to respond to large chlorine leaks. This team is on 24 hour stand-by call and can be reached by the District's pager system. The District has a comprehensive safety program addressing many phases of chemical safety. The Water Treatment Plant has a Right To Know station with all Material Safety Data Sheets listed and a copy of the entire safety program. The primary activity of this site is to treat drinking water for human consumption. Our source water comes from the Roanoke Rapids Lake with alternate source being the Roanoke River. Chlorine is the only substance stored and us ed at this facility that falls under the Risk Management Program with a capacity of 12,000 pounds maximum stored on site at any one time with an average of 9,601 pounds stored on site. The most probable worst case scenario would be a feed line being pulled loose from the ton cylinder to the vacuum operated gas dispensing system. Should this occur, the Emergency Response Team would be summoned and the Standard Operating Procedure for handling a large leak would be implemented. According to the RMP Comp modeling, the chlorine plume would travel .90 miles from the Water Treatment Plant. At this time, the District task force will be involved in handling the leak with City Fire and Police forces instituting the evacuation plan per Incident Command procedures. The estimated total number of people affected including industrial and residential would be 5,175 according to EPA's Landview program. To prevent this from happening, the District has budgeted for 1999-2000 Fiscal Year a Haloge n Automatic Shut-off valve that will sense a chlorine leak and automatically close the valve to the ton cylinder preventing a small leak from becomming a large leak. This will be done as soon as possible after July 1, 1999. The same procedures apply to the Alternate scenario with exception to the estimated area of release. According to the RMP Comp. modeling, the chlorine plume would travel .10 miles from the Water Treatment Plant. The estimated total number of people affected would be less than 100 according to EPA's Landview program. We have never had an accidental release of chlorine above the threshold limit of ten (10) pounds. The Water Treatment Plant has recently installed a backup system to the existing chlorination system to help insure a safe and efficient operation. At present, the District is looking into the possibility of a scrubber system in the future. We are always striving to seek more effective and safe ways to operate our process. |