Residents awoke to an odd smell last Friday morning in St. Marys — made all the more odd by the circumstances surrounding it.
A tanker truck, transporting poultry blood from Schneiders to Rothsay Rendering in Dundas (near Hamilton), sprung a leak near Pelissier Street in the west end of town. The driver didn’t notice the leak until he reached Highway 7.
Joan MacPherson was likely one of the first people to notice the leak. After closing up the family’s variety store at the corner of Water and Queen streets shortly after 11 p.m., she crossed Queen Street to check on property.
“When I went over, it was fine,” she told the Journal Argus. “And when I came back, it was like a river — a red river.”
She says that she couldn’t smell anything, but that “I was just afraid it may have been some kind of chemical; I never thought it was blood. I kept looking at it, it was kind of like a slush ... it didn’t move too much, and I could see little trails of what I thought was melting.
MacPherson adds that she “looked both ways, and I could see it in the moonlight, both ways up the street,” so she decided to leap across it rather than walking through it, and risk the chance of slipping.
She didn’t call the police to alert them — but someone else did, setting in place a day-long cleanup effort.
The driver of the truck, owned by Rothsay, called his dispatchers, who contacted Newalta, an environmental cleanup firm. The OPP, meanwhile, contacted fire chief Dennis Brownlee, who also serves the town’s emergency management director, and public works supervisor Dave Sharp.
Road closed signs were put in place to divert traffic from the spill, and Sharp contacted the Spills Action Centre, a division of the Ministry of the Environment, which legally has to be notified when large environmental spills occur.
Sharp says that his team first used winter road sand to sop up the spill, as it was all that was available during the overnight hours. Newalta also organized for additional road sanders to assist. Once morning came, they turned to stone dust, which is more absorbent. The sand was ground into the spill using street sweepers, which also swept up the mess. Ministry of the Environment officials determined the sand was safe to dispose of in the St. Marys Landfill.
The Perth District Health Unit was also contacted in the morning about the potential health harm to the town.  Dr. Miriam Klassen, the county’s Medical Officer of Health, says that the main risk of infection, albeit small, from the poultry blood was for those who came in direct contact with it.
Since the cleanup crews wore protective clothing, and washed their hands after coming in contact with it, they would be safe from possible infection from organisms such as salmonella, which could potentially grow in poultry blood.
But for the public, Klassen says, there was little risk. “Common sense is the best approach” she says, explaining that proper hand washing is key to preventing infection. As for the residue on the ground, she adds, the organisms die as the blood itself dries, further decreasing the risk.
The cleanup was mostly complete at around 3 p.m., when heavy rains started to fall, washing the rest into storm sewers. Area roads were formally reopened on Friday at 1:50 p.m., but many drivers ignored the closures. An intensive powerwashing of the affected streets began at around 8 p.m., with the waste water taken to an appropriate disposal site.
Ministry of the Environment officials were in town on Friday and were satisfied with the cleanup effort.
Jim Long, vice president and general manager of Rothsay, says of last Friday that “it was not our best day.”
According to the company’s website, www.rothsay.ca, “Rothsay is one of Canada’s largest renderers. The rendering process recycles animal and poultry by-products, including bones, trim, fat, offal and feathers, into a broad range of commercial tallow and protein products.”
Long says that trucks filled with this kind of load pass through St. Marys “probably every day they (Schneiders) kills chickens,” and that it was a Rothsay vehicle that caused the incident — the company is currently conducting its own investigation into what went wrong.
The driver was charged with having an insecure load under the Highway Traffic Act. OPP Sgt. Bernie Miedema says that, despite the magnitude of the spill, it was the most realistic charge to apply to the situation.
“With the Christmas parade coming up, we want to make sure everything’s ok,” Long says of the cleanup process. Rothsay will also be assuming the cost for the town’s participation in the cleanup efforts.
He adds that Rothsay “is more than willing to reimburse the cost of cleaning vehicles” affected by the spill. People can call Doug Lockhart at Rothsay at 800-263-0302, ext. 261, with proof that their vehicle was affected.