Fire department hazardous material teams had to put on special suits to stop a chlorine gas leak at a city of Kent well.<\/p>\n
Firefighters responded at about 7:23 p.m. Wednesday, June 12 to a hazardous materials incident at a building in the 24500 block of 104th Avenue SE, according to Puget Sound Fire spokesperson Pat Pawlak.<\/p>\n
“There are two tanks that contain chlorine, and it appears that there was a leak in a section of pipe,” Pawlak said.<\/p>\n
The city is required to keep a chlorine residual in the water distribution system to protect it from contamination and to protect public health, according to the city’s Public Works water maintenance and operations website.<\/p>\n
“Firefighters arrived and did an initial entry wearing their bunker gear and self-contained breathing apparatus,” Pawlak said in a June 13 email. “Their meters detected a moderate amount of chlorine. They closed the valves on the tanks and pressed the emergency shutoff. They set up an electric fan to ventilate the space.”<\/p>\n
When firefighters rechecked the space with their meters, they found there was still a moderate amount of chlorine, Pawlak said. The firefighters requested additional resources, which brought haz mat teams from the Renton RFA, South King Fire & Rescue and the Port of Seattle Fire Department.”<\/p>\n
The crews decided special suits would be needed.<\/p>\n
“Firefighters developed a plan to safely have two firefighters, in Level A fully encapsulated suits, enter the space and conduct some air monitoring and confirm the valves were closed,” Pawlak said. “When the firefighters entered, the meter detected a very low amount of chlorine. They disconnected the piping from the bottle, to isolate the bottle.”<\/p>\n
That stopped the leak and firefighters turned the building over to city employees.<\/p>\n
Pawlak explained the special suits.<\/p>\n
“Firefighters wear their self-contained breathing apparatus inside the suits so they are breathing clean air while in the suits,” he said.<\/p>\n
There were no injuries during the incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leak stopped Wednesday, June 12 from tanks at city well on East Hill; nobody injured <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":69775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69774"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69774"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=69774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}