Philadelphia - Merck Toxin Spill Kills 1,000 Fish - ENN

[hatrack]

PHILADELPHIA — Drugmaker Merck & Co.'s research facility in West Point dumped a chemical compound that included cyanide into the sewer system, killing more than 1,000 fish in Wissahickon Creek, federal authorities said Thursday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said during a federal and state investigation, Merck came forward to disclose that a vaccine research facility released about 25 gallons of potassium thiocyanate into the sewer on the morning of June 13.

"This appears to be the main cause of the fish kill," said Jon Capacasa, director of the water protection division for the EPA's mid-Atlantic region. The compound "reacted in a bad way with the chlorination system and created a chemical that was very toxic to the fish." Potassium thiocyanate is used for making industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals and pesticides.

Merck spokeswoman Connie Wickersham said the drugmaker believes proper procedures for waste disposal of the chemicals were not followed. She said chemicals should have been treated and rendered "neutral" at Merck's own waste treatment facility before being released into the sewer.

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=10732

[eppur_se_muova]

1. "compound that included cyanide" ... uh ... not quite.

Thiocyanate is not the same thing as cyanide, and does not have the toxicity of cyanide. Reporters need to be very careful about chemical names; most do not seem to realize that changing even one letter in a chemical name can indicate a completely different chemical. 'Almost' right is nowhere good enough.

This is not to say that thiocyanate is harmless; it certainly isn't. But it's not lethal at the low dosages that cyanide is.

Of course, potassium thiocyanate is a solid, so that should have been 25 gallons of KSCN solution. Without knowing the concentration, it's hard to know how much thiocyanate that represents.

I'm not sure what would have resulted from the chlorination reaction. I can imagine a couple of possibilities, but am not sure why they would have been more toxic that SCN- itself.

One of Merck's employees is up shit creek for sure. You can't work in chemistry without being aware of how critical waste disposal procedures can be. After all the resources they devoted to increasing worker awareness precisely to prevent this kind of very public screwup, you can bet someone in the upstairs offices is screaming for a blood sacrifice.

[NNadir]

2. It is really amazing how bad science reporting really is.

Merck has been synthesizing some aryl piperidines using copper thiocyanate to catalyze the addition of 4-iodopiperazines to aryl gringnard reagents. (cf: J. Org. Chem. 2004, 69, 5120-5123) Thus it is reasonable to assume that the solution was the effluent of a water wash following the coupling reagent. Probably the concentration of thiocyanate is unknown, and one should consider that the fish toxicity was related to another reagent, an organic solvent for instance. In any case, it is very unlikely that the reporter could have comprehended what the true situation was.

Probably the number (25 gallons) is made up, maybe by a Merck public relations employee who also understands very little chemistry.