Noxious Cloud Spurs Evacuation

About 700 people were evacuated for six hours from their homes and businesses and at least a dozen were treated for irritated eyes, sore throats and nausea early Thursday after a noxious cloud erupted from an overheated vat of epoxy resin at a fiberglass plant in the City of Industry.

Jim Scott, operations manager at the plant operated by the Hysol Division of the Dexter Corp., said the cloud contained carbon monoxide, ketones, oxides of nitrogen and other compounds, which, “at normal concentrations, are not considered dangerous.”

County health officials said they doubted there were sufficient concentrations of toxic compounds in the fumes generated by the decomposing resin to constitute a long-term health threat. “It appears to us now that the effects are going to be short term and reversible,” said Dr. Paul Papanek, chief of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services toxics epidemiology program. “It involves mostly irritative symptoms.”

Most of those treated at two local hospitals were employees at firms adjacent to the plant, which was closed for the night, but three were crewmen from a freight train that rolled through the cloud. Officials said all the patients were released after treatment. About 75 of the evacuees were given temporary shelter at nearby Los Altos High School.

The incident was similar to one 15 months ago when more than 50 people were treated after exposure to fumes from an overheated 55-gallon drum of epoxy resin at a General Sealants Inc. plant about a block from the Dexter Corp. facility.

Scott said the trouble at the Dexter plant apparently began after 9 p.m. Wednesday when a 150-gallon vat of the resin--used widely as a protective coating for electronics components--began to overheat in some sort of exothermic reaction, the cause of which was not immediately determined.

Scott said the reaction caused the resin to decompose and boil off as a vapor, creating the cloud that began to spread over a two-square-mile area near the plant at on Don Julian Road shortly before midnight.