Diesel spill briefly closes road in Sisters

A car-vs.-truck accident at the west edge of Sisters last Wednesday morning, January 11, ruptured a fuel tank on the truck, spilling approximately 50 gallons of diesel fuel and closing Barclay Drive for about five hours.

About 11:30 a.m. a small passenger car struck the side of a truck turning into a service station at the intersection of Highway 20 and Barclay Drive at the west end of Sisters.

The impact broke open the truck’s fuel tank. The driver pulled into Barclay Drive and parked between Crossroads Shell and Sisters Inn & RV Park. Diesel fuel flowed from the tank onto the roadway, covering an area about 30 feet wide and 200 feet long. Water from heavy rains and slushy snow were on the pavement and flowing along the south side of the highway from the overflow of Trout Creek.

Quick action was taken by the Oregon Department of Transportation and City of Sisters Public Works in closing down the road to prevent spreading the fuel by vehicles.

That action drew praise from Scott Porfily, president of SMAF Environmental, a private Prineville company contracted to clean up the spill.

“The city brought in the city’s cinder trucks and laid dirt on (the spill) and kept it contained — which was kind of a brilliant move on their part,” he said.

Containing the spill meant a considerably reduced clean-up effort and less expense to the trucking company’s insurance carrier, which is responsible for paying for the clean-up.

Porfily said that his company mobilized a crew and headed for Sisters shortly after the spill was reported. They parked a dump truck lined with visquine on the roadway and began scooping up the contaminated cinders covering the street.

Crews also laid out booms and pads made of melt-blown polyfibers specially designed to be hydrophobic. In other words, the pads don’t soak up water, but they capture hydrocarbons.

The clean-up crew then deposited Biosolve on the ground to break down the diesel and finally covered the area with 120 bags of Spilldry, a papery material that soaks up the chemicals.

Then they swept it all up and scooped it into the truck.

Porfily estimated that his crews hauled off about 15 cubic yards of dirt for disposal in a waste dump.

The crew worked from about 2 to about 6:30 p.m., then opened the roadway, which had been closed since 11:30 a.m.

“There’ll be some more work to do,” Porfily said. “We had to pull some soil samples from where the diesel ran off the side of the road.”

Those samples will be analyzed by the Department of Environmental Quality. The agency will determine if the soil is contaminated and needs to be removed. If it does, SMAF Environmental will excavate the soil and haul it off, to be replaced by clean soil.

Porfily said that, according to Oregon statute, the trucking company’s insurance carrier is responsible for paying for the clean-up, even if the other driver in the collision is found responsible. If that proves to be the case, eventually, the trucking company’s insurance carrier will likely recover from the other driver’s insurance company, Porfily explained.