Sunday, February 13, 2000
Failure of tank leads to national search
Defunct firms built others that ruptured
BY LUCY MAY and MIKE BOYER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Last month's rupture of a fertilizer tank in Riverside has triggered a nationwide search for similar tanks built by the same company or another, related, firm.
Authorities are investigating connections between the rupture here and three tanks elsewhere in the Midwest. All four tank failures have been blamed on faulty welding. The four tanks were built by either Carolyn Equipment Co. of Fairfield or Nationwide Tanks Inc. of Hamilton. Both firms were owned by Donald C. and Carolyn Walters of West Chester. Both firms are now out of business.
While nobody was hurt in the tank failure here Jan. 8, authorities worry future ruptures could injure people, destroy property or contaminate drinking water.
“If we have defects in tanks by this manufacturer, we've got to get the word out as quickly as possible,” said Mike Kroeger, chief of the Cincinnati Fire Division's fire prevention program.
Chief Kroeger has sent an alert to fire departments and safety officials nationwide, warning that authorities here found problems with welding on above-ground storage tanks.
Such massive storage tanks have gotten national attention before. In 1988 the U.S. Department of Commerce investigated the rupture of an Ashland
Oil storage tank that dumped more than 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the Monongahela River. That tank was built by a different manufacturer. Back then, Pennsylvania congressmen proposed national regulations for such tanks, but those proposals weren't adopted.
On Feb. 4, Chief Kroeger and other local fire and safety officials met with about dozen representatives of local companies with tanks and got their agreement to help create a voluntary registry of above-ground tanks in the city, listing who built the tank and when and a history of testing done on them.
Chief Kroeger said his office plans to send out letters in the next week seeking information for the registry and alerting companies to test any tanks built by Carolyn Equipment or Nationwide Tanks.
“It will give us a base of information and help us find out if there are any more tanks in the city built by these particular companies,” he said.
The registry initially will cover only the city of Cincinnati, Chief Kroeger said, adding that he's not sure how far the idea could spread.
Carolyn Walters, president of the now-defunct Nationwide Tanks Inc., told The Enquirer neither she nor her husband were aware of any widespread problems with the welds in the tanks built by the two firms.
“To the best of my knowledge, I'm not aware of any problems due to welding,” she said. “My husband was in this business for 30 years.” She said tanks built by her companies were given warranties for only one year “because you never know what the companies that build the tanks will put in them.” After tanks were built, she said, it was the tank owner's responsibility to have them inspected regularly.
Carolyn Equipment was foreclosed on by its lender in 1990 and Nationwide filed for bankruptcy in 1995. Mrs. Walters said she had no idea how many tanks the firms built.
“We built so many of them,” she said, and records for both companies were destroyed when they went out of business.
“We had good companies, but we had some bad luck,” she said.
Faulty welding
Southside River-Rail, the Cincinnati firm whose tank ruptured last month, conducts visual inspections of its tanks daily and more thorough inspections of the tank's interior every five years or whenever a tank's product is changed, said Vice President Jody Mangeot. Those inspections, she said, wouldn't have detected any welding problems with the tank.
Ms. Mangeot said her company had seven different million-gallon tanks built by either Carolyn Equipment or Nationwide Tanks. After last month's tank failure, the firm did ultrasound testing on each one, found similar weld problems with all of them and emptied the contents of each.
All of the tanks had been built within the last 10 years and were supposed to have been constructed to meet voluntary industry standards, Ms. Mangeot said. Each tank was expected to last 40 years or more, she said.
“If they're built to (standards), they're not going to have any problems,” she said. “(The manufacturers) put a plate on the side of the tank that they were built up to code.”
When such tanks are built, contractors often use subcontractors to do the welding, said John Gross, leader of the structural systems and design group for the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Mrs. Walters said that was the case with Carolyn Equipment and Nationwide Tanks, but she couldn't recall which firms did the welding on the tanks the companies built.
No matter who does the welding, not every weld is inspected on such storage tanks, Mr. Gross said. Rather, a third-party inspector typically does a spot check of the welding — every 100 feet or so — to make sure the welder is doing good work, he said.
“When you're talking about every 100 feet, you miss a lot,” Mr. Gross said. “There's an awful lot of things that can go wrong with welds.”
Other tank failures
Just last month, a tank built by Nationwide ruptured in Morral, a small village in Marion County, about 60 miles north of Columbus. The 1.5-million-gallon tank, owned by Morral Cos., spilled about a third of its liquid farm fertilizer. Most of that was recovered, and nobody was hurt, said company President Daryl Gates.
“If I have any more up here (built by Nationwide), I'd like to identify them so we can do something with them,” said Chris Bonner, emergency response coordinator for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency's central district office, who helped investigate the rupture in Morral.
The Andersons Inc., in Maumee, Ohio, had two storage tanks fail that were built either by Carolyn Equipment or Nationwide Tanks, said Gary Smith, spokesman for the supplier of fertilizer and other farm products and services.
One failure last July involved a million-gallon fertilizer tank built in Webberville, Mich. near Lansing, and a 500,000-gallon tank ruptured in Poneto, Ind., south of Fort Wayne in 1995, Chief Kroeger said.
In each case, the ruptures were blamed on faulty welding, he said.
“We had a number of tanks either built or reconstructed by (the two firms),” Mr. Smith said, but he didn't know how many.
After the July tank failure, he said, the Andersons did X-ray inspections on the welds of all its storage tanks across several Midwest states. That led to the reconstruction of several and the shutdown and demolition of two others that were beyond repair, he said.
He said he didn't know if the tanks that were rebuilt or taken down had originally been constructed by Carolyn Equipment or Nationwide Tanks.
In Cincinnati alone, there are 14,000 “site-erected” storage tanks of various sizes.
Business failure
When Nationwide Tanks filed bankruptcy in 1995, the company listed assets of $170,000 and debts of $339,482, according to court records.
The company, which the Walters couple acquired from a James Pridemore in 1990, employed fewer than 30 and had annual revenue of about $2 million.
The company erected above- ground liquid storage tanks of 50,000 gallons to 2 million gallons in size. Nationwide built tanks in Michigan, Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, according to court papers.
It was a 1994 tank project in Iowa that led to the company's bankruptcy filing. Heavy rains that spring delayed that project for three or four months “resulting in a loss on that job alone of $150,000,” according to court papers.
Additional losses on other projects totaled another $100,000 “as result, accounts payable skyrocketed and cash flow was critically impaired.”
Although Nationwide's fewer than 100 creditors approved its reorganization plan in late 1995, the company converted to a Chap ter 7 liquidation in 1997 when further losses made it impossible for the company to continue to meet the Chapter 11 repayment schedule, according to court papers.
It's unclear what, if any action, any of the companies or the authorities could take against the former owners of Carolyn Equipment Co. or Nationwide Tanks.
Ms. Mangeot said Southside River-Rail's insurance company is trying to track down the company that used to insure Carolyn Equipment and Nationwide Tanks. Mr. Gates, the Morral Cos. president, said his insurance company likely will try to do that, too.
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