A K-1 (kerosene) leak has badly damaged the Union Congregational Church of South Bristol Parish House and Community Center.
Norman Wright, a member of the church and caretaker of the building, reported the leak early Feb. 9, Rev. Dr. Peggy Dunn, the church’s minister, said.
The afternoon of Feb. 10 at about 2 p.m., a crew from Environmental Projects Inc. (EPI) was removing carpets, furniture and insulation from the building.
“There’s a lot of damage because there was a lot of kerosene that spilled,” Dunn said in a Feb. 10 interview at the church. “[EPI] had to basically gut both floors.”
The church’s plan for dealing with the spill is “to be determined,” Dunn said. No cost estimate has been made.
Jason Fish is an oil and hazardous materials specialist with the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Division of Response Services. Fish, citing the church’s oil records, said about 150 gallons of K-1 spilled.
Fish identified a “constant level valve” in a Toyo wall heater in Dunn’s office as the culprit.
Although a contractor, reportedly Damariscotta-based Mid-Coast Energy Systems, performed maintenance on the heater Feb. 7, two days before Wright reported the spill, the timing “could be coincidence,” Fish said.
“There’s no real way to determine” whether human or mechanical error was ultimately responsible for the spill, Fish said.
[Update: After press time Wednesday, Mid-Coast Energy Systems president Bill Morgner confirmed Mid-Coast technicians were in the building approximately two days prior to the reported leak, but they did not work on the heater in question.
There are three heating units in the building, Morgner said. Mid-Coast technicians worked one in separate room, located about 50 feet away from the site of the leak.
“To our knowledge we went in and worked on the unit in the room where they have the Alcoholic’s Anonymous meetings, because they use that room five, six days a week,” Morgner said. “We put a lift pump on that unit.”]
According to Fish, if a contractor doesn’t claim responsibility for the spill, a “no fault” state insurance fund will pay for clean-up and repairs to “anything structural” but will not cover carpets, painting or other non-structural facets of the restoration effort.
The removal of the kerosene-soaked wood and other materials is necessary to avoid the “unsafe” buildup of vapors in the building, Fish said.
The spill did not significantly damage the environment outside the Parish House, Fish said, as it was limited to the concrete sidewalk outside the building and the paved parking lot of the adjacent South Bristol Post Office.
During the winter, oil and hazardous materials spills are “not uncommon,” although spills from outside tanks are “more common,” Fish said. DEP responds to 2500-3000 spills annually, he said.
According to Dunn, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) will continue to meet at the Parish House each Sunday and Thursday at 7 p.m. in a large upstairs meeting hall away from the spill area.
Dunn plans to move her office into a downstairs space on the opposite side of the building from the spill, she said.
The South Bristol Post Office is downstairs in the same building. “It didn’t leak in here,” postmaster Wayne Benner said. “Business is normal.”
