“It was an emergency that turned into a non-emergency,” said Capt. Steve Teske of the Fort Dodge Fire Department.

The Region V Hazardous Materials Response Team based in Fort Dodge was dispatched Friday morning after a semi truck carrying 4,348 gallons of liquid fertilizer tipped over in the town.

“About 8:30 a.m. a semi driver was making a turn into a parking area and cut the turn too sharp, apparently, and rolled the tanker portion into the ditch,” Teske said.

The fertilizer, containing 12 percent nitrogen and 26 percent sulfur, wouldn’t be considered a hazardous material, he said. But it would raise the ammonia level in the waterway, and could potentially cause a fish kill.

“With high ammonia levels, you can have fish kills,” Teske said. ”If all that dumped in, that would have been a problem.”

Although there was a tile intake in the ditch where the tanker tipped, the Odebolt Fire Department was able to dike it with sand.

“Very little leaked out because of their quick action,” Teske said. “But then the ditch was filling because it’s fed by tiles that are running, and that runs into the intake which goes eventually in the creek.”

“(Odebolt Fire Chief) Greg Neville called to see if anything more they should do.”

Crews had already tried to pump the tank out using the normal hoses, but they’d been damaged too badly by the crash.

“If somebody tried to hook up, it leaked like crazy,” Teske said.

And the product in the tank weighed about 48,000 pounds.

“Basically to upright this aluminum semi tanker would put a lot of stress on it with that much product in it,” he said.

Instead, Hazmat team members drilled a hole in the side of the tank — which was now the top — and used their own air pumps and hoses to unload the product into two tankers sent from Crop Services, Teske said.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources responded to the scene, and said in a press release it’s unknown how much fertilizer leaked out from the top port before it was stopped and contained.

Some of the fertilizer ran into a small tributary, through a culvert and flowed through town to Odebolt Creek, the DNR said. Staff tested water quality at several places in the tributary and found elevated levels of ammonia, but did not detect ammonia downstream in the creek.

There are no fish in the tributary and no dead fish have been found.

The company will pump up spilled fertilizer and water trapped behind the culvert, the DNR said. It will monitor the cleanup and consider appropriate enforcement action.

“It took probably 2 1/2 hours to offload that much product, but it all went well,” Teske said. “No one was injured. No environmental damage.”

The tanker was beyond repair before the hole was drilled, Teske said.

“The tanker was already damaged to the point where, their insurance adjuster was on the scene, and said we’re never going to insure this tank again,” he said. “So if you drill a hole in the side it doesn’t matter to me.”