Trail City Council met with International Raw Materials (IRM) and Teck Trail Operations on Monday. The meeting was at the City of Trail’s request and was attended by the president of IRM, Tip O’Neill, and other senior officials from both companies. Mayor Martin describes it as a tough meeting for all involved, but feels reassured by the outcome. “We can have some confidence in hearing from the most senior representatives of IRM and Teck Trail Operations that they will be fully engaged to ensure that acid truck transport through our community will be done safely and there will be no environmental or health risk to anyone in our community.”
He says all truck transport is stopped for the time being. “As a result of the incident on Saturday, [IRM] have stopped all transport of truck acid through the city of Trail until such time as they can assure us that there will be no likely hood of any future incidents of the nature that we’ve experienced.”
Martin says some of the other actions that have been taken by IRM include replacing the trucking company, Westcan Bulk Transport, who was involved with the first two acid spills, with Trimack Transportation. Four new trailers for hauling sulphuric acid have also been purchased to replace the previous ones, and are being reviewed through a certification process by a professional engineering firm. Mayor Martin says IRM will ensure that Teck Trail Operations signs off on all of the certifications processes, policies, procedures and safety precautions before any transportation resumes. All drivers will also be thoroughly trained and maintenance procedures rigorously enforced.
Mayor Martin adds that based on this, he has full confidence that the appropriate steps are being taken and we will see the safe resumption of acid transport in the near future.
He provided some statistics on how much sulphuric acid is moved through the community. Annually, there’s 3,600 transport truck loads moving 165,000 tonnes of acid, which is about 10 trucks per day on average.