From the Arkansas Advocate:
A Fort Smith chemical plant that spilled thousands of gallons of highly acidic chemicals last spring lacked a permit to operate and had not disclosed to Arkansas authorities it was handling hazardous chemicals, according to state agencies and public records obtained by the Advocate.
The spill killed thousands of fish in nearby waterways, crossed state lines and severely damaged a city fire truck responding to the incident. Georgia-based C&S Chemicals had been making its sulfuric-acid based product Poultry Guard at the plant since opening in November 2024, according to a former employee and a LinkedIn post announcing its opening.
But Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment officials say the agency was “not aware” of the C&S Chemicals plant before the May 2 spill — and the facility never received a permit required to operate. It had never been inspected by state regulators either, the agency said.
Local and state emergency management officials have confirmed C&S Chemicals also hadn’t filed a report needed to help local officials prepare for such disasters — until two hours after the spill.
Now, as authorities from Arkansas, Oklahoma and the federal government deal with the aftermath of the acid spill, elected officials are demanding answers on how the chemical manufacturing plant could have operated with such little oversight.
“You had this stuff for two years or more, and you didn’t fill out the permits before you started filling tanks?” said Rep. Zack Gramlich, a Fort Smith Republican. The company had purchased the property in February 2024, according to county tax records.
Asked how C&S Chemicals was able to operate completely unpermitted before the spill, the Arkansas environmental regulator reiterated its lack of knowledge about the operations.
“E&E was not aware of the facility prior to the spill,” an agency spokesperson said.
C&S Chemicals declined to answer questions from the Arkansas Advocate, including whether it would pay for infrastructure damages, why it did not report the chemicals to the state, and why it hadn’t obtained permits before starting operations.
The company directed the Advocate’s inquiries to the FAQ page on the public website it created about the spill. The FAQ page gives a brief overview of the spill, including what happened, the chemicals that spilled, the affected area, remediation efforts, and instructions and contact information for residents.
Upon investigating the facility after the spill, the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment determined that C&S Chemicals operated without a legally required stormwater permit.
The permit is mandated by the federal National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, a provision of the Clean Water Act that protects waterways from industrial pollution. Without the permit and its requirements to track industrial runoff, the state agency and EPA were unable to monitor whether harmful pollutants were being discharged from the facility.
“E&E has notified the facility that they must obtain a NPDES permit,” the agency told the Arkansas Advocate in an email on July 30. It is unclear how this stormwater permit will apply, as C&S Chemicals has not confirmed plans to continue operations after the disaster.
According to the EPA, failure to obtain an NPDES permit when required is a violation of the Clean Water Act and comes with serious penalties. Operating without a water permit when required is also a violation of state law.
The EPA did not dispute that C&S Chemicals lacked environmental permits but declined to comment on whether the facility was legally required to have numerous environmental permits, including the stormwater permit. The EPA forwarded all permitting questions to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, noting the agency is the “delegated primary authority for NPDES permitting and enforcement in Arkansas.” The EPA could not comment on potential or ongoing investigations into C&S Chemicals for permit violations and negligence, a spokesperson said on July 13. The agency reiterated this in an Aug. 8 email to the Arkansas Advocate, noting it “does not comment on enforcement matters.”
C&S did not answer questions about why it did not obtain the stormwater permit, whether it plans to obtain one now or if it will resume operations at the Fort Smith plant.
‘An oversight’
Despite storing up to 368,350 pounds of sulfuric acid on site — more than 730 times the reporting threshold for sulfuric acid set by the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management — C&S Chemicals had also never reported the chemicals to the state, according to public records obtained from the agency through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Businesses handling hazardous chemicals are required to report chemical inventory annually under the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, designed to prepare communities for chemical emergencies such as the May 2 spill.
The reports are sent by the state to local fire departments to prepare for chemical disasters. But C&S Chemicals didn’t file its report until two hours after the spill, when C&S Chemicals’ corporate safety and compliance manager sent an urgent email to the state emergency management agency attempting to file the report, which had been due two months earlier.
“Again, this is an oversight and I am eager to correct this,” the email obtained via a FOIA request to the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management stated.
The company official said in the email they “did complete” their reporting but weren’t aware it “needed to be completed” through the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management website. The Fort Smith Fire Department and Sebastian County’s emergency management department said the company had not filed a report with them, and a spokesperson for ADEM said the state agency is the only repository of such reports, and the agency later fined C&S Chemicals for not filing its report on time.
But the damage had already been done. Early emergency reports from local authorities confirm first responders initially believed they were responding to a building that had flooded. They discovered at the scene that a highly potent and corrosive sulfuric acid was “leaking from a container” there.
Without the knowledge of what chemicals were stored, a Fort Smith Fire Department ladder truck responding to the incident drove directly into the spilled acid. The city is evaluating if the truck can be fixed or will need to be replaced, the city’s spokesperson said. New fire ladder trucks cost about $2 million and take several years to replace, according to the International Association of Firefighters.
The city confirmed first responders were not injured, and the facility was closed when the spill occurred.
State and federal investigators later determined that a tank of acidified aluminum sulfate — a product containing up to 10% sulfuric acid — had ruptured, which “broke the piping network,” causing other tanks to discharge their contents and breach the building’s walls, a May 4 internal email from a state environmental supervisor said.
Local stream ecosystem destroyed, thousands of fish killed
The destruction didn’t stop with public infrastructure. The acid spill quickly swept into a stream along the property line, crossing state lines and flowing nearly 3 miles downstream to the mouth of the Poteau River in Oklahoma. Communications between responding agencies, including pH test results obtained by the Arkansas Advocate through FOIA requests, show the acidity of the stream quickly plummeted despite intensive efforts to neutralize it.
The acid “killed virtually every fish” between the C&S Chemicals facility and the mouth of the Poteau River, said Brandon Brown, a fisheries biologist with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, who spent nearly two weeks counting dead fish on the Arkansas and Oklahoma sides of the stream.
“To this creek, it was catastrophic,” Brown told the Advocate.
The EPA described the initial release as resulting in a “complete collapse of the aquatic life in the area” of the spill.
Brown said he counted about 2,750 dead fish. Though he was able to survey the entire stream, he estimates the number only accounts for “a fraction of the fish that actually died.”
Odie and Gina Dillard witnessed firsthand the devastation. The stream spans the length of their property off of State Line Road in Pocola, Oklahoma. The day after the spill, Odie Dillard said he walked down to the water on his property to find tanker trucks and hoses submerged in a creek.
“And the creek was dark, dark brown, like dark coffee,” he said. He immediately spotted dead fish floating to the surface.
Although the Arkansas wildlife agency has been unable to provide an official or estimated count of the animals that died, a data collection and analysis by the Arkansas Advocate of the agency’s field observations and collected carcasses following the spill found 3,019 dead fish logged across both states, and 111 other animals.
"I’ve seen fish kills before, but not like this."– Brandon Brown, fisheries biologist with Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission initially indicated in a May 8 statement to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette only about 300 small fish had been impacted. But an internal agency report three days earlier confirmed that, in addition to the fish mortalities, 19 crayfish, two turtles, and one frog had also died.
The agency blamed the “fluid” nature of the multi-agency response for the discrepancy, noting that personnel could not gather complete data until the EPA deemed the water safe to enter.
But the delayed guidance didn’t stop Brown in Oklahoma, who began counting fish as soon as he was alerted to the spill on May 4. He soon discovered “it was a really special little creek.”
The stream and wetland area it led to were home to a number of rare fish species in Oklahoma, such as bowfin and golden topminnow that live mostly in the area around Fort Smith, where the Ozarks, the Ouachitas and the Arkansas River Valley meet up. The stream also hosted a thriving population of redfin darters, a fish belonging to the group with the second-highest conservation status in Oklahoma, Brown said.
The complete eradication of diverse fish species all in one place is not something Brown has witnessed in his 30 years working for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.
“I’ve seen fish kills before, but not like this,” he said.
‘It can all be lost’
The Oklahoma and Arkansas wildlife agencies have proposed C&S Chemicals pay for restoration efforts at the affected creek rather than pay a flat restitution fee for the fish killed. The approach includes paying for restocking the sensitive fish species killed.
The Oklahoma agency has also asked C&S Chemicals to make a donation to its planned in-house breeding program for Species of Greatest Conservation Need, Brown said.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said “C&S was very open to the remediation plan and would be talking with company leaders regarding implementation of recommendations.”
The immediate aftermath of the spill was complicated by conflicting reports of the spill’s volume, with initial reports to the National Response Center — the federal point of contact for chemical spills — of a 140,000-gallon spill downgraded repeatedly by agencies overseeing the spill to the final number C&S Chemicals provided to regulators, 77,877 gallons of acidified aluminum sulfate and 2,900 gallons of sulfuric acid.
The EPA told the Arkansas Advocate the initial number was based on the assumption that “all the tanks released their materials,” but the sulfuric acid was contained within the facility. The agency said the rupture “appeared to be related to the manufacture of that specific tank,” and “all other similar tanks” had been drained.
It remains unclear what penalties or enforcement action C&S Chemicals could face from environmental regulators. The EPA has declined to comment about enforcement actions. The Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment said the agency had not determined penalties yet.
“As E&E’s investigation of the incident and facility is still ongoing, E&E is still evaluating appropriate enforcement actions,” the agency told the Advocate on July 30.
Dave Owen, an environmental law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco and an expert on the Clean Water Act, said states are granted a “huge amount of discretion” to implement penalties recommended by the EPA, “much the same way as a police officer who pulls you over for speeding doesn’t have to give you a ticket.”
“If Arkansas DEQ tried to impose a penalty that is more harsh than the guidance recommends, that might lead to litigation,” Owen said. “But if Arkansas DEQ opts for a less harsh penalty, or no penalty at all, there’s not really anything anyone else can do about it.”
The only confirmed penalty C&S Chemicals has faced has come from the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, which fined it $790 for failing to file its chemical report by the March 1 deadline, a spokesperson said.
The city of Fort Smith said “responsibility for the costs has not yet been determined or finalized,” which includes damage to the fire truck and a sewer pipe.
Gramlich said C&S Chemicals should face enforcement action for operating unpermitted. The lawmaker said the spill should serve as a wake-up call for other facilities, too.
“If there’s other organizations out there, companies out there, who are operating like this, I want to figure out a way to help compel them or encourage them, rather, to come out of the woodworks and make sure we know they exist, so other municipalities don’t lose fire trucks — or worse,” Gramlich said.
More than two months since the spill, the Dillards said they have still not seen any fish in the creek, and the large egrets that hunted the fish have also disappeared. A few turtles and frogs have come back, but other animals like deer and geese have largely stayed away.
Odie Dillard expressed frustration over the lack of information he has received but said he is hoping for answers.
“How did it happen? Did somebody screw up? Was it neglect, or what?” he said.
For Brown, who spent days traversing the river, only to encounter dead fish at every turn, it’s a matter of respecting the “intrinsic” value of the fish and wildlife that surround us.
“This is an example of just how fragile it is,” Brown said. “It can all be lost.”
