Local

Police tally costs of Cobb Pkwy. dangerous spill

MARIETTA, Ga. — Marietta officials are trying to tabulate the cost of an accident that exposed dangerous chemicals and caused long delays on a busy Marietta road.

The spill on Cobb Parkway near Canton Road forced police to shut down miles of busy road and evacuate nearby residents Monday evening.

"We just heard it. It was like a loud boom," Lashunda Mosley told Channel 2's Ross Cavitt.

Mosley was one of dozens of residents at the nearby Hometown Inn, who heard the truck flip and went over to watch. Minutes later, she learned that she might be breathing in toxic chemicals.

"We were by the fence and then the police officers started panicking; they scared everybody," she said.

That was after firefighters realized the Tennessee Commercial Warehouse truck carried sodium hydroxide, lots of it, which was gushing onto the ground.

Firefighters now say some 500 gallons ended up saturating the nearby ground. The Tennessee-based trucking company called in an environmental remediation company to start the cleanup, supervised by the EPA.

That's an expensive process, but the whole evacuation and road closing process, which exceeded 10 hours, was costly to taxpayers, with all the fire gear and dozens of police officers trying to keep people out of the contamination zone and off nearby streets.

"There are a lot of areas that are impacted by this and because of that, it requires a tremendous amount of manpower to man each one of these intersections and each one of these roadways in an attempt to really try to lighten traffic as best as we can, given the situation," Marietta police officer David Baldwin said.

Officials, meanwhile, said they are still trying to tabulate the cost, including overtime costs for police and fire workers.