Hartsfield

Airport could be in hot water over an early January spill of deicing agents

that found their way into area drinking water supplies.

A state Environmental

Protection Division official revealed this week that, contrary to earlier

reports of a spill of only 250 gallons of chemical, the airport spilled

"at least 30,000 gallons" directly into the Flint River.

Bert Langley

of EPD's Emergency Response Program said the state agency has mailed the

airport administration a proposed consent order requiring both short-term

and long-term solutions to the problem ... solutions that could get very

expensive, he said.

Airport officials

did not respond to The Citizen's requests for comment. The office of Atlanta

Mayor Shirley Franklin did not return phone calls on the matter.

"It's

a big deal," said Langley. "I don't expect the airport to just

sign [the consent order]. We would require that they immediately come

up with a way to not have that happen again in the short term, and then

there's a long-term order for them to modify their facilities," he

said.

"It could

be a very expensive operation," he added.

The reason

for the spill, he said, is a "fatal flaw" in the design of deicing

facilities, adding that the design is in clear violation of both state

and federal law.

The system

is designed so that drains under the deicing pads funnel the fluid into

a sanitary sewer system for treatment before being released into the storm

water system, which drains into the Flint River, a major source of drinking

water for Fayette, Clayton and Spalding counties.

But the drain

pipes can hold only about 80,000 gallons of fluid at a time, Langley said.

If more deicing agent than that is pumped into the drains, there is no

reservoir to catch it, he said, so it flows directly into the storm water

system and thus into the Flint.

"There

are quick ways to fix that, and fairly inexpensive to initiate, but expensive

to operate," he said.

EPD also is

looking into the practice of some airlines that deice their planes at

their gates rather than on the deicing pads. It's yet to be determined

whether those airlines have drainage systems that connect to the sanitary

sewer, Langley said.

Further complicating

the situation for Hartsfield, Langley said, EPD will now want to review

the airport's entire pollution prevention program, giving attention to

every pollutant used in operations there, from jet fuel to fire-fighting

foam.

"It has

to be revised now. We're going to have to examine that real carefully,"

he said. "We're talking about everything at the airport in terms

of how it's segregated from the storm water."

He said the

airport's storm water permit is clear. "They're allowed to discharge

storm water, and that's all."

Asked how the

airport managed to design and build a deicing system that violated regulations,

Langley said EPD is looking into that, too. But he said it's not EPD's

general practice to inspect such systems when they are built.

With licensed

engineers designing the systems, he said, they're supposed to done correctly.

EPD is not

asking for any punitive fines in the consent order, Langley said. "We

would rather not argue over money, but get this problem fixed," he

said. "At a point where Atlanta has already got some fiscal problems,

we decided to ask for no monetary settlement.

"If we

can't come to an amicable agreement, then we may have to take other routes

including possible fines," he added.

Meanwhile,

testing of water from Fayette homes where residents complained of a "sickeningly

sweet" odor in the weeks following the snow storm continues to indicate

that the water is safe, Langley stressed. He said he is "almost certain"

that the odor is the result of the deicing spill, even though detectable

levels of glycol, the main chemical in the deicing process, have not showed

up in the water.

"Everything

we have seen inidicates that there just is no health issue," said

Langley. "Our toxicologist looked at it real carefully."

Both Clayton

and Fayette added activated charcoal to their treatment processes, and

Fayette has been flushing fire hydrants in neighborhoods the complaints

come from.