Austin Powder to pay $50,000 after Vinton County chemical release

The June 11 chemical release at Austin Powder’s Red Diamond plant could have been catastrophic, but a fast evacuation, emergency monitoring and a chemical reaction that vented the danger kept Vinton County from a worse outcome. Now the company will pay more than $50,000 to resolve an OSHA citation tied to the incident, reopening questions about what protected nearby communities and whether the plant is any safer now.

Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials said they were notified at 9:44 a.m. when an unknown contaminant entered a 5,000-gallon nitric-acid process tank at the plant. The reaction created nitrogen oxide gas, and an orange plume rose over the area before the evacuation of the Village of Zaleski and surrounding parts of Vinton County was lifted around 4:40 p.m. No injuries were reported, and air monitoring did not show positive readings for nitrogen oxide.

The response was led locally by the Zaleski Fire Department, which headed incident command, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. Ohio EPA said its Office of Emergency Response was on scene with the Ohio Emergency Management Agency, the Ohio Department of Health, the Vinton County Health Department, the Vinton County Sheriff’s Office and local fire departments that used drones to monitor the area. The federal board said the release forced a 3-mile evacuation radius, sent hundreds of residents out of Zaleski, and even triggered a temporary Federal Aviation Administration flight restriction over a 30-nautical-mile radius.

The Chemical Safety Board later estimated the June 11 event released 3,945 pounds of NOx and lasted more than three hours. Board Chair Steve Owens said the agency was concerned that nitric-acid incidents had happened at two Austin Powder facilities in less than seven months, after a similar incident at the company’s Midway, Tennessee, site in November 2024.

Austin Powder said after the June release that it would reimburse residents for evacuation-related costs such as hotels, transportation and meals. The company also said the Red Diamond plant resumed normal operations after a “safe containment and full assessment” of the release.

The latest penalty adds to a long record at the site. OSHA records show the plant was the scene of a fatal explosion on July 28, 2009, when three workers were life-flighted and one later died on September 1, 2009. Federal regulators also said in 2022 that Austin Powder would pay a $2.3 million civil penalty and invest about $3 million in wastewater treatment upgrades after alleged Clean Water Act violations dating back to 2013. For Zaleski and nearby communities, the question now is not just what happened that morning, but whether the lessons from this one were strong enough to prevent the next one.