Retrospect: Spill forced evacuation

Thirty years ago this week, a local nursing home was evacuated.

The March 8, 1993, edition of The Commercial Review featured a story about the evacuation of Miller’s Merry Manor in Dunkirk following a diesel fuel spill.

Mark Gephart, administrator at the facility, ordered the evacuation at 12:10 p.m. the previous day after fumes spread throughout the building and made an employee ill. He reported that a laundry department worker became ill after breathing the fumes. She was treated at Jay County Hospital and later released.

The leak came from an above-ground storage tank, said Ted Beer of Warsaw’s Carmet, which at that time owned the facility. About 200 gallons had spilled out of the tank that was used to power a back-up generator for the nursing home. He said he believed the leak came from a hole in the bottom of a tank sometime the previous night and that fumes entered the building through an open window on the south side of the building.

“These tanks are supposed to have a life of 15 to 20 years,” Beers said, noting that the tanks had been installed about three years earlier.

More than 10 area emergency and law enforcement agencies assisted with the evacuation, which took nearly two hours, with about two dozen Redkey and Dunkirk firefighters assisting medical crews with getting 10 residents into ambulances from Jay County, Randolph County, Wells County and Delaware County. The residents were taken to Miller’s Merry Manor in Hartford City. Vans were used to transport the other 40 residents to West Jay Junior High School, where they were temporarily sheltered.

Portland Fire Chief Doug Blankenbaker said the diesel fuel spill was contained by the use of absorbent chemicals on the ground and absorbent bags in Thong Run, a waterway located about 500 feet south of the nursing home.