Forty Gallons, a Ditch, and a Stock Pond

Take the ones that do not put anyone in the product; hold the ones that do.

• Can do: isolate and deny entry; position apparatus upwind and off the runoff path; establish a perimeter with the pad, the ditch, and the pond edge inside it; keep people and animals out of the ditch and away from the pond; request hazmat, EMS, and the state environmental agency through the IC; get the bill of lading and SDS from the driver without entering the release area.
• Stopping the source is the highest-value action - but who does it matters. Ask the manager whether the shutoff valve is outside the release area and whether he can operate it without walking through the product. If yes, have him close it, from outside the exclusion zone, while you watch from a distance. If the valve is inside the pool or the vapor path, nobody touches it: an ammonia solution at pH 11.5 is a respiratory and caustic hazard at close range, and a 40-gallon pool on a pad is not worth a responder's lungs.
• Must wait: deploying absorbent into flowing product, damming or diking the ditch, and any attempt to recover the material. Those put a person in contact with the product with no escape route and no ensemble, and the hazmat team will have a plan within the half hour.
• Never do: wash the pad or the ditch with a hose. Dilution pushes ammonia and a caustic solution into the pond.

Termination is a decision the IC makes; your job is to make it clean and documented.

• Do not declare the scene clean, safe, or 'all clear' - that determination belongs to the IC with the hazmat team's monitoring results, and it is not something awareness personnel certify.
• Keep the perimeter until you are released by the IC, then hand off whatever remains to a named person - a co-op representative or law enforcement - rather than simply driving away from an open ditch.
• Gross decon your apparatus where the tires and any hose touched the pad or runoff, and bag contaminated disposable items.
• Documentation: the two symptomatic customers, their names and symptoms, and where they went; the volume estimate you provided for the reportability decision; who closed the valve and when; the SDS and bill of lading you saw; and the times of every notification.
• Exposure records for your own crew, and a note of the ambient conditions - dusk, 34F, wet roads - because traffic and slip hazards were part of this incident even after the product was contained.
• If the co-op produces a form to sign, decline and route it to the IC. Your record should describe what you saw, not certify a regulatory outcome.

The product is not what makes this big - the pathway is.

• The stock pond is the receptor that drives everything: it may be livestock drinking water and it may recharge a well. Ammonia is toxic to fish at low concentrations, and a pH 11.5 solution is caustic to anything in the water. The environmental consequences, not the flammability of a fertilizer, set the urgency and the reporting.
• The overfill is not necessarily finished. A 1,000-gallon tank that overfilled has a vapor space and a tanker still connected; the transfer may continue by pump, by gravity, or by siphon. First check, from a distance: is the transfer actually stopped, and is the tanker's hose still connected? Ask the driver and the manager, and confirm visually rather than taking a yes.
• The source may be larger than the pool you can see. The pad is concrete, but the ditch is grass, and grass hides both the extent of the flow and how much has already reached the pond.
• The conditions compound it: dusk limits your ability to see the sheen or the flow, wet roads and a working forklift create vehicle hazards, and 34F makes a wet responder a cold-injury patient.
• So reportability, downstream notification, and protecting the pond are the same conversation - and the volume estimate you pass up is the piece only you can supply right now.