North Carolina fertilizer plant fire caused air pollution five times higher than EPA limits

VIDEO: A Forsyth County environmental official was shocked when he learned how much pollution an inferno at a Winston-Salem fertilizer plant was sending into the air. Between midnight and 6 a.m. on Feb. 2, an Environmental Protection Agency air monitor set up at the Wake Forest University Police Station detected that particulate matter, called PM2.5, at an average level of 1,750 micrograms per cubic meter. That’s more than five times the 300 micrograms the EPA considers hazardous over eight hours during a fire. “I had a panic attack,” Minor Barnette, director of Forsyth County’s Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection, told a state environmental committee Wednesday. “I’ve never seen numbers like that anywhere in North Carolina that I was aware of, and this was right here in our community and within the jurisdiction of our agency.”

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