Conyers BioLab fire causes continued shelter in place, health concerns across metro Atlanta

Rockdale County Fire Chief Marian McDaniel said a fire sparked at the BioLab facility early Sunday morning. A small fire on the roof caused the sprinkler system to malfunction, dousing the water-reactive chemicals inside the building, including chlorine.

“Once the water made contact with that chemical, we have that plume that you’ve seen for the last two days,” McDaniel said in a press conference.  

Evacuations and shelter in place

Kayla Altland lives about two miles from the BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia, 30 miles east of Atlanta. Her kids had been cooped up inside for days during Hurricane Helene, and she was getting them ready to do some activities outside the house Sunday. 

But then, she said her mother-in-law showed her a phone emergency alert. She received it too a couple minutes later: Close the windows, and turn off the air conditioning.  

“It wasn’t until probably 11:30 that we actually saw a smoke cloud out like that … It had started to come over to where we live,” Altland said. 

Shortly after, she got another message instructing her to evacuate. She and her husband, along with their two kids and her mother-in-law, packed up and went to a hotel further away. Both her toddlers and her mother-in-law have asthma. 

“We just wanted to make sure they weren’t impacted in any way,” Altland said. 

She was among 17,000 residents who received an evacuation order. The rest of the county, which has about 90,000 residents, were ordered to shelter in place, and schools are closed.

She said at first, she didn’t think county communications explained the severity of the situation.

“It was unclear, to say the least,” she said.

But she started to realize how serious it was when she went online and saw other people’s photos, videos and descriptions of the chemical smell. 

Around 8 p.m. Monday, Rockdale County lifted its shelter-in-place order. But, by around 4 a.m. the next day, it was reinstated.

EPA air quality testing data shows that between 5 p.m. Monday and 5 a.m. Tuesday, levels of chlorine, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen sulfide started periodically rising to high levels at several of its testing stations. At one station, chlorine levels in the air were over 62 times the EPA limit. These peaks in chemicals were intense and brief, most likely as the wind changed.

Rockdale County announced around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday that the shelter-in-place order is to last from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. each night until Friday.

“During certain times, due to weather and inversion in the evening, air quality readings may dip to concerning levels for those in direct exposure to the plume,” Rockdale County’s website alert said.

Spread over Atlanta and testing protocol 

The plume of smoke originally was blowing away from Atlanta, but shifted according to meteorologist Marshall Shepherd.

“I pulled up some data [Monday], and it looked like the wind shifted such that the plume is being blown more into the metro Atlanta area,” Shepherd said.

WABE received messages from several listeners describing the fog and haze across the metro area. Messages also described the chlorine or bleach-like scent in the air, as well as headaches, metallic tastes in the mouth, chest tightness and burning, as well as eye irritation.

An EPA statement said “the odor threshold for chlorine is very low, meaning people can smell it at very low concentrations that do not cause harm,” but some air quality experts weren’t so quick to dismiss a sniff test. 

“The human nose is actually much more sensitive than even some sensors and devices that are designed to measure these particular types of chemicals,” said Glory Dolphin Hammes, the CEO of IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company. 

Smelling something in the air doesn’t always indicate its presence, nor that the amount of the chemical in the air is a dangerous amount, but Hammes said it shouldn’t be so dismissed. 

She also said, more obviously, that inhaling contaminated air can have extremely detrimental health effects.

“We have chemicals that are actually toxic to the human body replace the air that we’re breathing and replacing, at times, oxygen that we’re breathing,” she said.

It’s not something regular air sensors test for. IQAir is a worldwide network of sensors, and it checks for common types of air pollution, such as PM2.5. That’s the smallest type of air pollution and is the most hazardous to health because it is the easiest to breathe in — in Atlanta, most residents hear about PM2.5 in conversations about traffic and transportation-related air pollution. 

For instances like the BioLab fire, special air pollutant sensors are needed. 

Local nonprofit Environment Equity Information Institute (E2I2) held a press conference Tuesday highlighting their work trying to place sensors tailored for specific communities that can sample the particular contaminants they are most concerned about, for example, the type of chemical at a nearby industrial facility. 

Louise Palmer, executive director from E2I2 said that the nonprofit was alarmed by air pollutant readings they collected at their office on Spaghetti Junction about 9 a.m. on Monday. 

“We took one of our units downstairs at around nine o’clock in the morning, and immediately we saw the pm 2.5 levels increase dramatically,” Palmer said. “It continued to rise over the course of the 30 minutes that we were outside doing our testing; The data peaked at 68.8 micrograms per cubic meter.” 

After, Palmer said the numbers started to lower. But that peak, she said, is extremely concerning. She said her office is 20 miles away from the BioLab fire, and they were seeing rates of PM2.5 that was almost 650% greater than the recommended EPA level for humans. 

Brian Vasser, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the agency has been testing air quality at and around the BioLab site. 

“The primary constituents that we’re worried about are chlorine or hydrochloric acid, both of those are given off in this reaction that’s kind of ongoing at the site,” he said. 

He said the EPA is seeing very little of both outside the immediate vicinity of the BioLab plant.

The Georgia Environmental Protection Division is also participating in testing, as well as Atlanta Fire & Rescue. They have also maintained that in Atlanta, their tests show that the levels of chemicals in the air are “safe for most people, according to the Atlanta Fulton Emergency Management Agency.”

The EPA and local agencies said they’ll continue testing.

Track record and legal troubles

This isn’t the first time the BioLab facility has had a dangerous incident.

On September 14, 2020, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board sent a team to investigate BioLab due to a chemical reaction that sent chlorine vapor over Conyers. I-20 was closed for over six hours, and residents and businesses were told to shelter in place. Similarly to the current incident, a spokesperson told the USCSHIB team the incident was caused by water exposure inside the facility.

In 2016, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division received complaints of a smoke coming out of the facility that was “a chemical decomposition was reported to have started in the east portion of the Bio-Lab hazardous waste storage area.” The Rockdale Fire Department responded, and they said chlorine was not detected in the area.

In 2004, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division fined BioLab $24,000 for a fire at a warehouse containing millions of pounds of pool chemicals. Thousands of residents evacuated. The enforcement order also required BioLab to do environmental cleanup, like excavating soil on site due to the fire water runoff and providing lab data confirming water and soil had been restored to cleanliness. The company also needed to do restoration work of VFW Post 5290 Lake after runoff caused a fish kill.

Now, at least six lawsuits have already been filed against BioLab, and its parent company KIK Consumer Products. The suits focus on public health and property-related issues, business losses associated with the emergency evacuation and shelter-in-place orders.

The lawsuits, filed in Gwinnett County State Court, Rockdale County Superior Court and the federal district court in Atlanta, focus on health and property-related issues tied to emergency evacuation and shelter-in-place orders.

KIK Consumer Products did not respond to WABE’s request for a comment. The company has issued one press release, which states “Our top priority is ensuring the community’s safety, and our teams are working around-the-clock to respond to the ongoing situation at our facility in Conyers, Georgia.” The company wrote that it continues to work with first responders and local authorities to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.