Police probe cause of tanker truck crash, Mill River damage assessed

A day after a fiery tanker truck crash destroyed a Rockville Centre building and sent gasoline into the nearby Mill River, authorities were cleaning up the area, investigating the cause of the crash and assessing the damage it may have done to the environment.

In an email, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Environmental Conservation said most of the 9,200 gallons of gasoline the truck was carrying had burned in the fire. But cleanup workers found dead animals, including three waterfowl, three fish, and "a number" of red-eared slider turtles in an area of the river near Merrick Road.

There was no evidence wildlife outside that area were impacted by the fire and spill, she said.

The agency's Spill Response Unit laid down absorbent booms before "significant" amounts of gasoline entered the river, though it was impossible to estimate how much fuel did enter the river, she said.

Vacuum trucks began sucking gasoline from the water after the crash and that work continued Thursday, she said. "DEC continues to oversee the cleanup to ensure public health and the environment are protected."

Workers flushed the storm drain system Wednesday and in coming days will excavate contaminated soil along the northern edge of the shore and replace it with clean soil and plantings, she said.

The head of a conservation group said he feared the river's fish and plant life could be impacted.

"Oil and gas are highly toxic, even in small amounts, to aquatic life," said Enrico Nardone, executive director of Seatuck Environmental Association, the Islip-based conservation group that has worked to restore the river, a spawning ground for one of Nassau County's largest surviving river herring populations.

"There are not many rivers we’ve treated worse" than Mill River, he said. It absorbed millions of gallons of raw wastewater after Superstorm Sandy and runs underneath Sunrise Highway and Long Island Rail Road tracks, where it is walled in by bulkheads.

He said the spill came near the start of migration season for river herring, a once-abundant species his group is trying to restore in Long Island's waterways.

About 3,000 fish — there used to be hundreds of thousands or millions, Nardone said — make the yearly trip from the ocean to Mill River spawning grounds.

Seatuck and the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery have nearly finished building a fish ladder to ease their journey and increase their numbers. "It would be a tragic irony" if the spill ends the migration season before it starts, he said.

The Governor's Office of Storm Recovery has been guiding work, started after Sandy, that is intended to improve the resiliency of communities along the river and the South Shore's bays. A spokeswoman for that office said part of a living shoreline installed at Lister Park to mitigate erosion and stormwater runoff had been damaged. Remediation will take place in coordination with the village and state environmental officials, she said.

Authorities have not yet explained the cause of the crash shortly before 1:10 a.m. Wednesday morning that terrified witnesses but caused no fatalities. Nor have they released the name of truck driver, though they have identified the company he worked for as Rocket Express Corp. of Bay Shore. The driver, who sustained minor injuries, spoke with the police Wednesday, authorities said.

At the scene Thursday afternoon, Nassau County police took masurements to reconstruct the crash and workers hung new traffic lights and poles to replace those that had been knocked down or melted. A state transportation department spokesman said installation of a temporary traffic signal at North Centre Avenue would be finished by Monday morning's commute. A portion of North Centre between Sunrise Highway and Merrick Road is temporarily closed, along with other traffic restrictions.

Surveillance video from a nearby gas station shows the truck pass two vehicles as it approaches North Centre Ave., then overturn. It skids through the intersection, then ignites in a white flash. Seconds later, a person stumbles from behind the truck cab, then out of the frame of the image.

The road still smelled of gas. Excavators dug through the site of a former La-Z-Boy store that burned after the crash and has since been demolished.

Across the avenue, Bargain Liquors was open for business but bore the marks of a brush with disaster: blue tarp covered its charred exterior, and the front doors were covered in plywood.

Closed after the crash, two area elementary schools, St. Agnes Cathedral School and Riverside Elementary, reopened Thursday.

Thursday, the village's records officer had not fulfilled a request for documents, including the village police department's accident report for the Wednesday morning crash.

A man who answered a phone number for Rocket Express Corp., the Bay Shore company that operated the tanker, hung up without answering questions.

In her riverfront home, one village resident said the worst seemed to have passed. Event producer Leslie Price said she'd awakened at 3 a.m. Wednesday with the stench of gasoline in her nose and the taste of metal in her mouth. By Thursday the air felt clear again.

She praised village police and officials, including Mayor Francis Murray, whom she said had responded swiftly to mitigate damage and allay residents’ concerns. "I have confidence in my mayor and his team," she said.

She and her husband, John Price, moved to the village after "we fell in love with the river," she said, and often walk there. Riparian life, too, appeared to have returned to normal: during a phone interview with a reporter, Price said she was watching cormorants dine on fish.

With John Valenti

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.com,john.asbury@newsday.comspanglernewsday,

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.