Fire investigators will wait until Monday to begin sifting through the debris of an Athens chemical plant destroyed by fire Wednesday.
"We're going to let it cool over the weekend. The investigation will begin Monday at 7:30 a.m.," said Athens-Clarke fire inspector Harold Williams.
Williams also is waiting for a report on air quality inside the wreckage of J&J Chemical Co. before giving the OK for investigators to go inside, he said.
The factory, where a couple of dozen workers made restroom deodorizers, graffiti remover and other products that contain toxic chemicals, caught fire about midnight and burned most of the day Wednesday. Explosions periodically rocked the building, located in Athens Technology Park off Olympic Drive, and blue runoff flowed into a stream that feeds into Trail Creek.
Workers with a private environmental cleanup firm, HEPACO, took air samples Thursday inside the building in Northeastern Clarke County but had not completed their analysis as of Friday, Williams said.
"My main concern is firefighter safety," he said.
The site will be guarded around the clock over the weekend, and cleanup crews won't haul anything away before fire investigators say it's OK, Williams said.
State arson investigators are assisting in the investigation, but as yet investigators have no reason to suspect the fire was anything but accidental, he said.
Even though investigators don't plan to go into the rubble of the 30,000-square-foot building until Monday, they began photographing the wreckage from above Friday, using a ladder truck and a Georgia State Patrol helicopter, Williams said.
The fire, which may have begun in a storage area, grew so intense that Athens-Clarke firefighters had to back off and let it burn itself out. Flaming debris ignited brush fires in nearby woods and for a while threatened nearby manufacturing businesses.
The products J&J Chemical makes use toxic chemicals, including methanol, para-dichlorobenzene, formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde. Some of those chemicals washed into Trail Creek and flowed into the North Oconee River as firefighters poured more than a million gallons of water onto the fire.
State environmental officials couldn't say Friday just how much of the chemical mix poured into the stream.
One chemical in the mix, a dye, painted the Trail Creek water bright blue and turned stretches foamy as the chemically laden water flowed into the creek from the fire site.
By Friday afternoon, the blue-tinted water had traveled miles downstream into the Oconee River, said Ben Emanuel, the Oconee River project director for the Altamaha Riverkeeper.
Emanuel tracked the blue water down Trail Creek to where it joins the North Oconee River, then south to the border with Oconee County border where the North Oconee merges with the Middle Oconee to form the Oconee River.
"We're going to let it cool over the weekend. The investigation will begin Monday at 7:30 a.m.," said Athens-Clarke fire inspector Harold Williams.
Williams also is waiting for a report on air quality inside the wreckage of J&J Chemical Co. before giving the OK for investigators to go inside, he said.
The factory, where a couple of dozen workers made restroom deodorizers, graffiti remover and other products that contain toxic chemicals, caught fire about midnight and burned most of the day Wednesday. Explosions periodically rocked the building, located in Athens Technology Park off Olympic Drive, and blue runoff flowed into a stream that feeds into Trail Creek.
Workers with a private environmental cleanup firm, HEPACO, took air samples Thursday inside the building in Northeastern Clarke County but had not completed their analysis as of Friday, Williams said.
"My main concern is firefighter safety," he said.
The site will be guarded around the clock over the weekend, and cleanup crews won't haul anything away before fire investigators say it's OK, Williams said.
State arson investigators are assisting in the investigation, but as yet investigators have no reason to suspect the fire was anything but accidental, he said.
Even though investigators don't plan to go into the rubble of the 30,000-square-foot building until Monday, they began photographing the wreckage from above Friday, using a ladder truck and a Georgia State Patrol helicopter, Williams said.
The fire, which may have begun in a storage area, grew so intense that Athens-Clarke firefighters had to back off and let it burn itself out. Flaming debris ignited brush fires in nearby woods and for a while threatened nearby manufacturing businesses.
The products J&J Chemical makes use toxic chemicals, including methanol, para-dichlorobenzene, formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde. Some of those chemicals washed into Trail Creek and flowed into the North Oconee River as firefighters poured more than a million gallons of water onto the fire.
State environmental officials couldn't say Friday just how much of the chemical mix poured into the stream.
One chemical in the mix, a dye, painted the Trail Creek water bright blue and turned stretches foamy as the chemically laden water flowed into the creek from the fire site.
By Friday afternoon, the blue-tinted water had traveled miles downstream into the Oconee River, said Ben Emanuel, the Oconee River project director for the Altamaha Riverkeeper.
Emanuel tracked the blue water down Trail Creek to where it joins the North Oconee River, then south to the border with Oconee County border where the North Oconee merges with the Middle Oconee to form the Oconee River.
