OSC Heister had seen news coverage of the spectacular blaze on 5/17/2009, the aerial shot showed that the fire was in the midst of residential neighborhoods and commercial businesses.  Heister contacted Andy Smith the Phone Duty Officer in Seattle.  They discussed the situation and agreed that since Heister lived 18 miles from the site it would be worthwhile to contact PGE and make arrangements to meet at the site the following morning.

Heister met Mr. Chip Bloomer, Environmental Services, Portland General Electric (PGE) at the substation approximately ten hours after the transformer fire had been suppressed.  Heister had contacted PGE the afternoon of 05/17/2009 to arrange the meeting and assess the impact of the transformer fire and countermeasures PGE had taken.

Heister met Mr. Bloomer at the site at 0645 hrs on 5/18/2009.  Mr. Bloomer said the large skid mount portable transformer had been brought in to temporarily replace the permanent transformers so that they could be serviced.  Some time on 05/17/2009 the temporary transformer experienced a catastrophic failure and caught fire.  Local fire authorities allowed the fire to burn out which took several hours. Mr. Bloomer and Heister discussed the electrical equipment involved in the fire.  Mr. Bloomer produced sample results for all three peices of equipment.  Two 9 gallon station transformers burned on the skid trailer and they both were non-detect for PCB.  The larger 3120 gallon transformer had dielectric containing 4 ppm PCB.  this is considered to be a non-PCB transformer under TSCA.  I asked Mr. Bloomer if the PCB capacitors located in the far NE corner of the station were impacted and he said no.  They inspected the capacitors and they were in fact intact and unaffected.

Heister then ask Mr. Bloomer to show him the area impacted by the dielectric oil.  This area was slightly down slope from the burn area and covered approximately 800 sq. feet of packed gravel contained on the PGE sub-station property.  Heister asked Mr. Bloomer if any surface water was impacted and he said there was a season creek (Teal Creek) about 400 feet NE of the fire.  He confirmed that it was not impacted.

Heister asked Mr. Blomer what PGE's next steps were.  He said that equipment was stationed outside the sub-station ready to excavate the oil contaminated gravel.  They were waiting for the metal trailer and carcass of the burned transformer to cool so that work could be conducted safely.  Heister verified where the equipment was and in fact there were clean up crews prepared to clean up the site.  Mr. Bloomer told me it was a top priority to get the contamination cleaned up and get the substation operational as soon as possible.

As a former PCB inspector Heister had worked with PGE many times before and was confident a thorough clean up would be conducted.  Heister told Mr. Bloomer to call me if the situation changed dramatically.  Heister left the site at approximately 815 hrs.