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Demolition crew Monday cuts through pipe with ammonia in it at former warehouse owned by Tracy Cold Storage.
 Photo by Glenn Moore
A break in an ammonia pipe on MacArthur Drive sent one man to Sutter Tracy Community Hospital on Monday morning and forced an evacuation of neighboring buildings.
Property owner Souza Realty and Development hired W.C. Maloney to demolish an equipment room at the front of the old Tracy Cold Storage building at 24500 South MacArthur Drive. Tracy Cold Storage used ammonia as a refrigerant to cool 50,000 square feet of space in the warehouse.
A man operating an excavator for W.C. Maloney broke open a condenser at about 9:30 a.m. He reportedly became sick after he inhaled the gas. An ambulance rushed him to Sutter Tracy Community Hospital, but people on the scene said he was conscious and alert as the ambulance took him away.
Mike Souza, vice president of Souza Realty and Development, said his company removed the old ammonia cooling system from the eight-room warehouse, a concrete tilt-up building built about 60 years ago, and replaced it with a freon-based cooling system in the two rooms still used for cold storage.
Souza said he and Maloney thought all of the ammonia was gone before they started demolition. He said the ammonia was drained from the pipes, condensers and from a tank, and the tank was removed from the site.
He noted that there were three condensers in the 1,900-square-foot equipment room, but two had been out of use for several years and were not maintained. The one that had been out of use the longest still had ammonia in it.
“We’ve been draining the system for the past two months,” Souza said. “That was the only ammonia in the system that was left.”
He said the contractor will double check all pipes and valves before continuing with demolition.
Tracy Cold Storage moved out at the beginning of the year and Souza now leases the building to Taylor Farms. Another building on the site is occupied by a recycling company, and two others are vacant. Souza has begun to develop the rest of the property as an industrial park.
The building is outside of Tracy city limits and governed by San Joaquin County building division rules. County Fire Marshal Steve Dalton said inspectors have followed other aspects of the retrofit project, but the county does not require step-by-step inspection of a demolition project, even if there are hazardous materials on-site.
“Typically, if someone is demolishing a building, it is the owner’s responsibility to follow OSHA’s (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) rules,” Dalton said. He said that even after ammonia is removed there is likely to be residue or vapor left over.
“If we had known beforehand that we were dealing with an old refrigeration system, we would have at least educated them on what could happen.”
Tracy Fire Department Division Chief David Bramell said there didn’t appear to be a large amount of the chemical left over.
“If you had a big vapor cloud, that would pose a potential threat, but we don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with,” Bramell said.
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I have it on good authority by my best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw a city official take a bribe at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious. 
