Fuel Spill Hits Environmentally Sensitive Deep Brook

By John Voket

Workers detecting the strong smell of fuel around businesses on Commerce Drive Wednesday morning helped alert Newtown firefighters to a potentially devastating environmental emergency. What appeared to be a significant amount of diesel fuel or heating oil was found flowing through one of the state’s purest watercourses.

The fuel spill, which apparently originated somewhere in Fairfield Hills, possibly at Reed Intermediate School, polluted the waters of Deep Brook, one of just eight Class 1 trout fisheries in the state. As The Bee went to press on Wednesday this week (on an early holiday deadline schedule), local emergency services volunteers from every fire station, representatives of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and workers from Fleet Environmental Services were still working intently to pinpoint the source of the spill.

At approximately 10:15 am, a crew of responders began converging around open manholes at the rear northeast corner of the school grounds, adjacent to the Governor’s Horse Guard headquarters off Trades Lane.

The watercourse contamination was first verified by firefighters in Sandy Hook Center where the Pootatuck River passes under Church Hill Road. Volunteer firefighters from Sandy Hook and Newtown Hook & Ladder followed the fuel slick upriver to Deep Brook, a tributary to the Pootatuck that runs along the portion of the Al’s Trail greenway near its terminus at Fairfield Hills.

The firefighters placed a series of containment booms on the surface of the watercourses as they went. A thick concentration of blood red fluid was pooling at the emanating point, and thick streams of a rainbow-colored petroleum substance were still evident in the waterway below the first two collection stations.

Just before 10 am, fire department crews determined the point where the fuel was apparently flowing into the brook. That location was about 75 feet down a grade below a state salt storage shed operated by the Department of Transportation.

Although volunteers from Hook & Ladder opened several manholes beside the storage shed, no fuel was detected in those passages.

Within ten minutes of discovering the contamination point, special HazMat spill apparatus was dispatched from the United Fire Company of Botsford. Additional HazMat equipment was later summoned from Southbury.

As crews worked to lay an increasing number of spongelike booms across the fouled waterway, attention turned to an in-ground heating oil storage tank at the Reed Intermediate School. State and local environmental and fire officials gathered around a manhole behind the school to assess the possibility that the tank was the source of the contamination.

However, at presstime, Fire Marshal William Halstead was still unable to decisively identify the source or content of the fluid.

“We’re still actively searching for the source,” said the fire marshal. “We’re locating every possible location where fuel may be stored and we’re taking readings to try and find the leak. The fluid appears to be heating oil, but it may be diesel.”

Deep Brook narrowly escaped similar contamination in December 2003, when 4,550 gallons of #2 heating fuel spilled from an external heating system at Canaan House. After that spill, the state DEP supervised the removal of hundreds of tons of contaminated soil from around Canaan House, and none of the heating fuel reached the natural trout fishery. Local conservationists later called that incident a “near disaster” for Deep Brook.

According to Fire Marshall Halstead, crews were expected to be working the scene for some time.

A full report on the spill and its aftermath will appear in the January 7 edition of The Bee.