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Ohio EPA identifies source of oil that leaked into the Mahoning River in Warren
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency says used motor oil leaked from an open valve on an 800-gallon tank at W.T.R. Services Inc., 2421 W. Market St., on Wednesday and traveled into the Mahoning River through a storm sewer.
The valve was left open because of human error, said Lindey Amer, OEPA spokeswoman. The oil was being transferred from an 800-gallon tank to a 200-gallon tank so that it could be placed in a burn furnace.
The oil was discovered on the river at around 9:30 a.m. Thursday by a resident on the eighth floor of the Buckeye Apartment Building on Tod Avenue Northwest next to the river. Authorities were notified, triggering work by the Warren Fire Department, Warren Water Pollution Control Department, Trumbull County HazMat and others to control the spill with booms on the river.
Amer said she doesn’t know how much oil was released, but the OEPA thinks most of it was contained by the booms. At noon Thursday, a light amount of oil was still entering the river through a large storm-sewer pipe along Tod Avenue Northwest, across from Perkins Park, just west of downtown.
Firefighters were using booms there and along the bank of the river below the Main Avenue Bridge to stop the oil, though it appeared some still was traveling downstream toward Niles past the boom. The Main Avenue bridge is south of downtown.
The oil, which had a noticeable smell at the storm-sewer pipe, traveled through a part of the river that is just west of Courthouse Square downtown.
Amer said W.R.T. Services, which advertises itself on the Internet as a Dumpster-rental company, is hiring a company to take over the remainder of the containment and cleanup.
The spill was similar to one from early March in that both entered the river through storm-sewer pipes. The earlier spill came from the east of the river, however.
That spill of hydraulic fluid came from Wheatland Tube on Dietz Road, which is about a mile east of the river in the Golden Triangle area on Warren’s East Side and in Howland. W.T.R. Services is about 1.3 miles west of the river.
The OEPA and the Warren Pollution Control Department were looking for the source of the spill at 12:30 p.m. Thursday but had not yet found it, said Enzo Cantalamessa, Warren safety-service director. The spill did not pose any danger to drinking water, he noted.
Amer added that there are no water inlets on the Mahoning River from Warren to the Pennsylvania line, meaning the river isn’t used by public-water suppliers in that part of the river.
Warren draws its drinking water from Mosquito Lake.