Louisville Metro Emergency Services, along with the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA, revealed more details about their plans to dismantle a home full of hazardous materials on Applegate Lane in the Highview neighborhood Thursday night in a community meeting to update residents on when the process will take place.
The site setup will begin on Monday, October 9, with the dismantling beginning no earlier than October 16. Officials expect the process to take around 10 days and hope to finish around October 27.
The city previously revealed their plan to slowly take apart the home. They plan to construct a 17-foot perimeter wall of shipping containers and remove the materials inside. Those materials will be crushed, processed in a steel tank in the backyard, and shipped off to a waste facility.
“We’ll have a crew of about five working inside of the property,” . “We’re going to build a container wall around the property to deflect any lateral blast from any possible explosives that may be left.”
At Thursday’s meeting, officials described finding hundreds of small bottles filled with unknown chemicals. They said various containers like pill bottles, crockpots, and pressure cookers were all filled with unknown substances.
Chuck Berry, an on-scene coordinator with the EPA’s Emergency Response and Removal Branch, said that is why the best solution was to dismantle the home.
He said it is just simpler and easier to crush all of the containers together, react them off, and then ship that waste out as one load instead of trying to characterize and quantify every individual bottle.
Officials described what precautions they are taking to ensure neighbors’ safety, such as setting up an air processing system around the property to monitor chemical reactions.
Fern Creek Fire will be on scene and crews will use an infrared camera to monitor temperatures in the house to avoid a structure fire.
The city has outlined a small evacuation zone and a larger “shelter in place” zone in case a dangerous chemical reaction occurs.
Source: WAVE
You must be logged in to post a comment.