A section of Highway 30 in western Iowa was closed for a few hours Thursday afternoon because of a huge gasoline spill. Crawford County Emergency Management director Greg Miller says at 1:45 p.m., emergency crews were called to the Amaizing Energy Ethanol plant west of Denison.
"A tanker car that was full of 28,000 gallons of gasoline that they mix in with their ethanol before it goes out for public consumption and a valve in the bottom of the tanker car was open when it should have been closed," Miller says. "…It dumped the full contents of the tanker car."
The gasoline went into holding ponds on the ethanol plant’s property. "But since it’s gasoline, it’s a lot more volatile than the ethanol," Miller says.
With highly-volatile gas vapors hanging in the area, authorities shut down traffic on a nine-mile stretch of Highway 30 from Denison to Dows City.
There were no injuries associated with the spill.
Several HAZ-MAT crews in the area helped in the clean-up, putting a foam blanket over the pond that’s saturated with gasoline. "When you have a spill of that size, it takes quite a while to get all of it covered," Miller says.
Highway 30 was re-opened to traffic shortly before four o’clock Thursday afternoon.