It’s every tanker-fleet operator’s nightmare: a severe crash or rollover of a unit carrying a highly caustic, flammable, or poisonous cargo. The need for fast response to contain any leaking fluid that could harm humans or the environment is a given. As a result, most such fleets carry spill-containment equipment on board, and have trained their drivers to immediately report the incident to head office or another authority, so that a professional hazmat clean-up team can be dispatched from one of the many firms across North America who provide this service under contract.

But what about the much more commonplace incident where a fuel tank or line gets damaged, a radiator hose coupling fails, or a collision on the highway triggers a leak of diesel fuel, oil, antifreeze, or perhaps an environmentally unfriendly liquid that’s part of your dry-van cargo?

The quantities spilled may be smaller, but the need to promptly react to keep such fluids out of storm drains or roadside ditches is just as urgent.

Problem is, it seems that most fleets don’t carry containment materials on board, even though a basic homemade kit could be put together at a typical grocery or hardware store in about 15 minutes and for less than $50 (it can be done-see the sidebar on page 40).

“The quantity of a spill that triggers a government reporting threshold will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” says Jim Young, a senior trainer and administrator with the Humber College Centre for Transportation Training in Toronto. “But usually it doesn’t take too much. I’m sure that if you lost even just half of one saddle tank on a typical tractor-that’s 50 U.S. gallons-you’d be into all those administrative headaches, too. The more the driver can contain and clean up on his own, the better.”

Of course, hazmat regulations themselves aren’t exactly light reading, and it’s not always clear who is responsible for enforcing them. A discussion of the federal, provincial, and, in some cases, municipal regulations regarding what constitutes a reportable spill-and the definition of “hazardous material”-could fill this whole magazine. However, the federal government’s basic categories of dangerous goods and the amounts that trigger mandatory reporting can be found in the sidebar on page 44, and the phone numbers and Web sites of all the provincial/territorial environmental authorities on page 43.

It’s worth checking into so you can stay on top of the changes. For instance, Ontario’s environment ministry recently updated its spill-reporting guide and clarified the exemptions to the province’s Environmental Protection Act, as Jim Renahan, co-ordinator for contingency planning at the ministry’s Spills Action Centre, explains.

“There’s always been an exemption for fluids under 100 litres, other than cargo, that may be released from the operating systems of motor vehicles,” he says. “However, the reporting exemption only applies if three conditions are met: the spill does not enter and is not likely to enter, directly or indirectly, a body of water or a watercourse; the spill does not cause adverse effects other than those that are readily remedied on surfaces prepared for vehicular traffic or adjacent paved, graveled, and sodded areas; and arrangements for remediation are made immediately.

“The standard requirement to notify the municipality where the spill occurred, as well as the owner of the leaked material and the management of the company that had control of the material when the leak happened, still remains in effect, however,” Renahan adds.

A spill-whether cargo or from a system integral to your truck-that causes damage to public or private property, or that’s inadequately cleaned up, can result in a legal statement of claim against the fleet in question. A compensation guideline from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment notes that “.the owner and controller of the spilled pollutant are absolutely liable for cleanup costs that are a direct result of the spill. They are also liable, subject to a few defences, for all other loss or damage.”

And if your leak, spill, or accident occurs in a municipality other than the one where the vehicle owner resides, be prepared to pay for the services provided by the local fire department if it has to respond to the incident.

“That should be one motivator for fleets to carry spill kits,” Jim Renahan sums up. “Operators may well conclude that they can do it cheaper themselves.”

The Toronto Fire Service charges $300 for the first hour or any portion thereof for each vehicle responding, and $120 per half-hour per vehicle thereafter.

On major highways, the Ministry of Transportation is billed, who then pursues the truck operator. “If there’s a fuel spill or something similar, and a material like Oilsorb must be spread, the charge is $6 per 50-pound bag, although usually we don’t charge for the first bag,” Toronto Fire Service billing clerk Sherry Ballantyne explains.

“Now, these fees only relate to a routine situation like a burst fuel tank from a collision or something similar. The chargeback for large spills of hazardous materials from a tanker truck or other trailer are handled by a different department-but I know the fees are much higher.”

Even just a “routine” incident like a damaged fuel line or burst rad hose can cause quite a mess. A typical tractor contains 30 to 36 quarts (28-34 litres) of oil, about 42 quarts (40 litres) of antifreeze solution, and, of course, usually a pair of fuel tanks with a total capacity of 200 US gallons (757 litres) of diesel fuel.

Out in the workaday world of fleet ops, the effort devoted to being prepared for a spill pretty much depends on the perceived level of risk.

“We’ve got several van-trailer units that carry hazardous materials on a regular basis, and those are equipped with spill kits, including containment ‘socks’, booms, rubber sheets, recovery drums, and that sort of thing,” says Bob Halfyard, manager of driver relations and training at Challenger Motor Freight in Cambridge, Ont. “But dangerous goods is only about 6% of our cargoes, and for the rest of the fleet, we don’t carry anything special on board.”

Halfyard doesn’t see as many fuel leaks as he used to: many truckmakers have eliminated crossover lines between the fuel saddle tanks, and now route the lines individually (“dual-feed/dual-return”) from the tops of the tanks.

“When they started making more aerodynamic tractors, built closer to the ground, and still kept the crossover lines between the fuel tanks, it was easy for these to get torn off if a truck went over a rock, lump of ice, or what have you on the highway, or if they caught the edge of a curb while going to or from a customer’s location,” he recalls. “As more and more specs called for the dual-feed system, this problem was eliminated.

“Now the fuel spills we experience are basically just from either refueling incidents in a yard, or accidents on the highway where the actual fuel tank is pierced.”

Although spills out on the road are rare at Challenger, they do happen, and then drivers can show a wide range of resourcefulness.

“There’s been more than one time that I’ve paid to replace articles of clothing for a driver when the guy used a shirt or jacket or whatever to help plug a leak,” Halfyard recalls with a smile. “And that’s OK with me-whatever it takes to get things under control.”

The technology of spill clean-up has made some great strides in recent years, too, he observes. “I had one accident recently that occurred near a construction site, and our driver was able to grab some sandbags from there and get the leak all nicely diked and accumulated, and we figured the fire department would pump it into a container,” he relates.

“But along they come with some kind of biological dispersing agent, dumped about 40 litres of this stuff into the fuel, then kicked open the dike and flushed the contents right down into the sewer. They told me it was now biodegraded or whatever, and would be completely harmless to enter a water system.”

At Kingston, Ont.-based linehaul operator SLH Transport, fleet and safety manager John Lewis acknowledges that his outfit also doesn’t routinely equip its trucks with spill kits, but also notes that the majority of fuel-spill situations he encounters concerns refueling foul-ups at the pumps, not a problem on the highway.

“We’ve had only four on-road fuel spills in the past two years, all from direct damage to a fuel tank such as a piece of brake spring on the roadway getting kicked up and holing the tank,” he says. “In every case, the driver was able to adequately contain the situation by pulling over and making a dike from gravel on the shoulder or similar materials, then phoning Dispatch for a response team to be sent out. But it’s true that it would be good to carry something better, and we’re currently considering buying some of those tubular absorbent ‘socks.’ ”

Full spill kits are kept at each refueling island, and every so often someone used to set the nozzle for unattended filling and then walk away and get distracted, causing an overflow. Once or twice, a driver has even started up and pulled away with the hose attached, tearing off the nozzle.

“In these latter cases, you don’t get much of a spill, because the pump will automatically shut down if there’s nozzle damage,” Lewis explains.

“For the other cases, we’ve now taken the precaution of removing the auto-flow lock on the hoses, so the refueler has to stay there and keep his or her hand on the nozzle’s handgrip all the time.”

As one might imagine, the spill-control philosophy at a tanker fleet is pretty highly developed. At Harmac Transportation in Vaughan, Ont., safety director Curtis Roush explains that each truck carries a basic containment kit with several six-foot socks, a 20-kilogram bag of Spill-Dry, a pack of absorbent clean-up sheets (nicknamed “diapers”), a shovel, sewer-grate sheet, and several 20-litre pails that are also routinely positioned under connections when pumping.

“You can go as elaborate as you want with spill-kit components, but when you’re equipping a large fleet, cost is always a consideration, as is storage space,” he notes. “Interestingly, I don’t believe there’s any actual government regulation that specifies a requirement to carry spill kits, even for tanker fleets-and I know of some that, in fact, don’t keep anything on board.”

With tanker trailers, whose capacities can reach 10,000 gallons or more, any serious rupture would, of course, far exceed the ability of the driver to handle, even with basic containment materials at hand. However, the typical leakage problem is not that overwhelming, and an on-board spill kit can make a lot of difference while the driver awaits response from local authorities and one of the emergency spill-response firms on 24-hour contract to Harmac.

“As with so many aspects of trucking, having your people properly trained is key,” Roush sums up. “We have a three-day training course for new hires-I’m thinking of extending it to four days-and safe handling of hazardous materials as well as proper emergency procedures are emphasized all the way through. That driver is the first person on the scene if you have a spill problem, and their actions need to be absolutely automatic if you want to minimize the damage.”

And another fleet manager, who wishes to remain anonymous, echoed the sentiment and added his own perspective on spill-containment capabilities:

“We emphasize careful operations in our driver-training program, but even the most careful driver can still end up with a spill or leak,” he acknowledges. “We make sure they know things like the potential danger of diesel fuel getting in proximity to a cargo like ammonium nitrate-based fertilizer. That creates a product that’s highly explosive, and you don’t want to find that out the hard way! “As far as having a spill kit in your vehicle, we and other fleets I’ve talked to probably should do more, but it’s like trying to keep a basic tool kit in the vehicle: over time, stuff ‘walks off,’ and then you don’t have it when you need it. And even a basic spill kit still costs money, which you must multiply across every unit you operate.

“That may seem to be a short-sighted reason to not have them, but nobody thinks in terms of needing to clean up a spill on any given day. So you just decide to save that money.”

With reports received from one emergency spill-response company in Canada that some environmentally hard-nosed jurisdictions in the U.S. like California or Florida are imposing clean-up fees as high as $30,000 for a modest on-highway incident if diesel fuel gets into a watercourse, the above mindset is long overdue for change.