A tanker truck carrying gasoline overturned under the West Seattle Bridge late Wednesday night.
No one was injured when the truck overturned near the intersection of Chelan Ave SW and Delridge Way SW. The crash left one of the truck’s two tankers on its side. Officials say the overturned tanker started leaking and holds around 5,000 gallons of gasoline.
“At this time we don’t know exactly how much has leaked, that will only be determined when they offload the remaining product and they can see how much they have left over,” Hilton Almond with the Seattle Fire Department said. “Right now, we have slowed the leak down. It is still leaking at this time. We have the owner of the truck has sent a responsible party to help offload that material.”
Firefighters sprayed the area with environmentally friendly foam as a vapor barrier to prevent the gas from igniting.
Initially, the main concern was fire and explosion due to the gasoline smell, but as the morning progressed the fire concern changed to an environmental concern.
“The gasoline that did leak did get into a storm drain that feeds into the Duwamish. We had a crew check the Duwamish, as well as had a company go up to the shore, right now they report that there are no signs of any foam or gasoline on the water,” Almond said.
Despite their best efforts, Autry said some gasoline will most likely end up in the river.
“Seattle Fire has put a boat in the water. They haven’t seen anything in the river yet. However, the tide is high and likely holding back whatever is in the stormwater system,” City of Seattle’s Eric Autry said. “We have resources coming that are going to be able to clean out the stormwater system as much as we can and also their main priority is pumping that truck out, so there is no more is spilling.”
The West Seattle Bridge off-ramp to Delridge Way was closed until Thursday morning while crews cleaned up the spill.
