ADAMS TWP — County officials and a private environmental cleanup company are working to address a diesel leak in Breakneck Creek in Adams Township.

The leak was discovered Tuesday around 6:30 p.m. near the intersection of Hutchman Road and Clay Avenue.

Tim Llewellyn, Adams Area Fire District chief, along with Butler hazmat specialist Scott Hoffman said the leak originated from an off-road diesel fuel tank on a commercial private property.

“There was a privately owned fuel cell that failed and released a yet-to-be determined quantity of fuel,” Llewellyn said. “This was a container on private property that failed, most likely due to age.”

The spill flowed into an unnamed tributary running along Hutchman Road that eventually empties into the Breakneck Creek, he said.

Hoffman said there were no water intakes or downstream users of water that would be impacted by the spill.

“There are no water intakes, from what we were able to determine last night. That was my first concern, was if there were any downstream users,” he said Wednesday. “If there was a municipal water authority drawing water out of that for public water supply, or anything like that, those would be downstream users.”

Adams Area Fire District, Callery Volunteer Fire Company, Adams Township Police Department, the Adams Township emergency management coordinator and the Butler County hazmat team responded to the spill.

Once alerted to the spill, crews got to work containing it. Firefighters and hazmat experts deployed absorbent “booms,” which Llewellyn described as looking like a large stuffed sock, to float on top of the water and absorb the leaked diesel fuel.

“They only absorb petroleum products,” he explained. “We deployed booms across both the unnamed tributary as well as the Breakneck Creek in five locations. At three of the locations, we were able to see the oil product floating in the water. At the two locations farther away, we were not able to detect any of the product, so we believe we contained it within the first three creek crossing sites with the booms.”

The booms helped contain the spill in the water. With the help of the hazmat team, Llewellyn explained, the spill also was contained on the ground of the property. The property owner then contacted a private environmental cleanup agency to address the ground contamination and remediate the waterway.

“I spoke with the representative from the cleanup company today, a short while ago, and they said they were going to replace some of the booms that had become saturated with product,” Llewellyn said. “That cleanup and mitigation is going to be ongoing with their efforts in place.”

Using booms to clean up spills is typical procedure for contamination situations such as this, Hoffman added.

“We try to absorb as much of it as we can, to stop the progression if we can,” he said. “As long as we can find the source of it, we can stop it there to keep it from getting any worse. In this case, we knew where the leak originated from.”

When the spill was discovered Tuesday night, a Swift municipal alert was sent out by text message and phone call to Adams residents advising them to avoid the creek.

Llewellyn advised residents to continue avoiding the area Wednesday.

“We believe we have appropriate measures in place, with our initial (work) and the environmental cleanup people, that there should be no harm to the general public,” he said. “However, we are recommending that the public remain clear of the waterway and the private property while the mitigation efforts are continued.”

The Adams Area Fire District has seen more spills in recent months, Llewellyn said.

“Unfortunately, in the past seven or eight months, it has become common,” he said. “We responded to a larger spill last year that was started at the roadway near the 7-Eleven in Adams Township, and we responded to another suspected spill which turned out to not be the case.”

Llewellyn doesn’t expect that spills or contamination are a one-time problem.

“As our communities continue to age with private properties, and as more people begin to build homes in the area, I can anticipate that we will continue to respond to these with regularity in the future,” he said.

In Hoffman’s experience, spills such as this one more often stem from causes other than failing tanks.

“Most of them are results of vehicle accidents, not normally like this with this tank leaking,” he said. “Normally, fuel spills are results of motor vehicle accidents or some sort of equipment failure or something like that. We haven’t seen a lot of them, which is good.”

Hoffman advised those using fuel or diesel tanks to regularly inspect their tanks for rust, especially around the valves and fill locations.

“If you can have secondary containment around them, that’s probably the best option,” he said. “Some of the tanks they make are double walled, with a tank inside of the tank. If the inside tank (were to) leak, it would be caught in the secondary tank.”

In the case of the Adams cleanup, the rest of the cleanup process now lies with the environmental cleanup contractor.

“I don’t think there is a huge amount of remediation that is going to need done,” Hoffman said. “Between them and the (state Department of Environmental Protection), they will make sure that the impact is resolved.”