Hazmat team responds to 50 litre fuel spill in downtown Vancouver

Vancouver’s hazmat team was called to the scene of a fuel spill Tuesday morning, where 50 litres of gasoline had leaked from a vehicle’s gas tank into a parkade on Cordova and Main streets.

Emergency crews received the call around 8 a.m. and were told that the owner of the vehicle thought they may have run over something, damaging the gas tank.

“Subsequently, when they left their car, they did have a small leak in their gas tank, which turned into them losing, I would imagine with the type of vehicle, it was it probably lost about 50 litres of fuel through that hole,” Vancouver Fire’s acting assistant chief Wes Abrams told CityNews.

Also read:

• ‘Chemical leak’ at Surrey’s Guildford Recreation Centre turns into a false alarm

• ‘The new normal:’ Vancouver firefighters see 12 fires in 24 hours

“So the hazmat team was called in, they surrounded it, and created a dike around the area and mitigated the spill.”

They then pumped out the fuel tank and towed the car away, Abrams said. In total, crews were on the scene for approximately two-and-a-half hours.

Nobody was injured or hurt, Abrams confirmed.

“(It was) definitely a situation where a fuel spill… there’s a number of variables, especially with gasoline it can be quite volatile,” he said. “However it was a safe situation, they were able to get there, no ignition sources were around it. So all it was was just cleaning up the spill,” he said.