Radioactive medical supplies spilled near Chelmsford, Mass.

[Ian David]

GLIDE Number: NC-20070712-12315-USA
Date / time: 12/07/2007 03:41:13
Event: Nuclear Event
Area: North-America
Country: USA
State/County: State of Massachusetts
City: Chelmsford
Number of Deads: None or unknow
Number of Injured: None or unknow
Damage level: Minor

Description:

Early Friday morning a pickup truck carrying radioactive medical supplies rolled over on Route 3 North. During the incident, a plastic cover came off the truck’s bed and boxes containing vials of radioactive material tumbled onto the highway and down into a culvert, according to Deputy Fire Chief Michael Curran. The pickup truck’s driver, Steven Sekenski of Woburn, was not charged with anything following the 4:10 a.m. accident, according to State Police Spokesman Robert Bousquet. Sekenski carried medical supplies to area hospitals in a 2006 Ford Ranger owned by Cardinal Health Services, according to the state police report. On this particular trip he had 18 boxes of varying sizes, containing radioactive chemicals used for CAT scan imaging, according to Town Manager Paul Cohen. Chelmsford firefighters collected 11 of the lunch-box-sized containers along the highway. And on the shore of a stream that flows into Freeman Lake, firefighters found three containers. Three more containers could be seen in the water, and firefighters used a flat-bottomed boat and a pike pole to retrieve them, said Curran. But that left one box missing.

Officials from several state and local agencies including the Nuclear Incident Advisory Team, HAZMAT and the State Police Underwater Recovery Section showed up to search the area. State Police officers used a helicopter and thermal imaging cameras, but they could not recover the last box. Each container held several vials of radioactive chemicals — radionuclides — according to the firefighter report. According to Cohen, the chemicals have half-lives of about 100 minutes, so about half of the atoms would disintegrate into another nuclear form within 100 minutes. “It really presented no danger to the water supply,” Cohen said. Of the 17 boxes recovered, none of the vials inside had ruptured, he said. And HAZMAT found no abnormal levels of radiation coming from the recovered boxes, Curran said. “It starts decaying right after they make it,” Curran said. It gets shipped early in the morning, so that hospitals can use it throughout the first half of the day, according to Curran. Officials shut down the right lane from the time they arrived, at about 4:15 a.m., until 7:30 a.m., when the search moved to Stony Brook, Curran said. The recovery mission started to wrap things up around 2 p.m., said Curran.

More:
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?lang=eng&cid=12315