Toledo’s chemical leak shut schools, a Jeep plant and the port. Officials say the tank is nearly spent

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — A leaking tank of an industrial resin chemical in north Toledo forced nearly 1,000 people from their homes overnight Tuesday, kept tens of thousands more indoors on Wednesday, shut the city’s schools and halted work at a Jeep assembly plant. By Wednesday night, officials said the danger was easing, but a half-mile evacuation zone was still in place and the tank was still venting.

The release began at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at the MC Tank Transport terminal at 1266 Progress Ave., where products are stored before being shipped by rail or truck, WTOL reported. Toledo Fire & Rescue ordered everyone within a mile of the terminal to evacuate at 10:48 p.m. and, at 4:24 a.m. Wednesday, told everyone within three miles to shelter in place, according to the city’s incident page. At 5 p.m. Wednesday the department lifted the shelter-in-place order and cut the evacuation zone to a half-mile.

The chemical is glycidyl methacrylate, which the company says is “used to make certain plastics, paints and coatings perform better.” The city warns it can burn the eyes, nose, mouth and skin and can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea and vomiting.

What officials say happened

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency attributed the release to an “error that occurred when the material was being transferred,” agency spokesperson Bryant Somerville told CNN. The state agency said the chemical came from a 5,500-gallon tank. The agency has not said what the error was, and the cause remains under investigation. Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said officials could not yet say whether there had been an explosion.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s response page says the city’s fire department tried to contain the release and could not. “The tank has been compromised and the chemical within the tank is completing a reaction,” the EPA wrote in a 10 a.m. Wednesday update. “The city determined that the safest course of action is to let the reaction complete.” The EPA said five of its on-scene coordinators were at the site, with four stationary air monitors and three sampling locations. It said it would bring in its mobile air-monitoring lab later this week and post the data as results come in.

MC Tank Transport, a subsidiary of the Ohio-based Kenan Advantage Group, confirmed in a statement that “equipment associated with our operations is involved.” The company said it had mobilized additional emergency-response resources and was working with the American Red Cross on lodging and transportation for displaced residents.

ProMedica said it had evaluated and treated about 30 people with symptoms “potentially related” to the leak as of Wednesday afternoon, most of whom were released, CNN reported. A sheriff’s deputy who had trouble breathing drove himself to a hospital, a city spokesperson told the network.

A port, a rail line and a state line

The incident reached well beyond one industrial block because of where it happened. The three-mile shelter zone covered more than 50,000 people, including neighborhoods along the Lake Erie shoreline, and stretched across the state line into Michigan, the Associated Press reported. Toledo Public Schools and Washington Local Schools closed, and Stellantis stopped production at its nearby Jeep assembly plant, the AP said.

Freight stopped, too. CSX trains on lines running along the property were halted, and ships in the Port of Toledo were held at the docks, where crews were “picking up odors,” Toledo Fire & Rescue special operations deputy chief Michael Posadny said Wednesday, according to CNN. The city said the nearby interstate stayed open, with drivers told to keep windows up and recirculate air. The city also said tap water was not affected, and that its services would return to normal Thursday.

Toledo’s mix of rail yards, river terminals and lakefront neighborhoods is common in the industrial Midwest, where hazardous materials move by tank car and tank truck within a few hundred yards of homes. When one container fails, a decision made at a single terminal can close schools, shut a factory and stop freight in two states.

The East Palestine comparison

For Ohio, the obvious comparison is East Palestine, where a Norfolk Southern derailment in February 2023 ended with responders venting and burning five tank cars of vinyl chloride. In its final report, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the vent-and-burn decision was “unnecessary.” It said the railroad and its contractors had inaccurately represented that the cars were at risk of a catastrophic failure from a polymerization reaction, and had not passed relevant expertise and dissenting opinions to the incident commander.

Toledo officials took the opposite approach. Rather than intervene, which the mayor said carried a slim chance of setting off an explosion, they let the tank finish its reaction while drones checked it about every half-hour. The mayor said waiting it out had “no negative impact.” Whether that call was right, and what failed during the transfer, are questions the Ohio EPA, the U.S. EPA and any federal investigators will have to answer on the record.

Toledo’s leak is one of several chemical tank emergencies this year, CNN noted. In May, an overheating tank of methyl methacrylate at a Southern California aerospace plant forced 50,000 people to evacuate, and a tank failure at a paper mill in Longview, Wash., killed 11 workers. Toledo itself had a deadly blast at an industrial recycler in August.

What to watch

Three questions are open: when the remaining evacuees can go home, what the EPA’s air sampling inside the zone shows, and whether the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates industrial chemical accidents, will open an investigation. The Inquisitor asked the Ohio EPA, the U.S. EPA’s regional office in Chicago, the Chemical Safety Board, the Toledo mayor’s office and the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University about the cause, the air data and federal review. None had responded by publication. The Ohio EPA has since responded; its answer is below. This story will be updated with any other responses.

The Ohio EPA said questions about the release, containment, monitoring and sampling should go to the Toledo Fire Department, which is leading incident command. The agency said it has issued no permits related to chemical storage at the facility; its only permits there are National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System wastewater permits.

Update, Oct. 23, 2026: This story has been updated with a response from the Ohio EPA.

Featured photo: Toledo, Ohio, along the Maumee River. MrJacon000, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.