The state of Minnesota — specifically, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency — was a day late and a dollar short, but remained lucky in the fact that no one was injured when a fermentation tank collapsed at the Al-Corn Clean Fuel Facility outside Claremont on Saturday.

The accident spilled more than 400,000 gallons of cornmash, which took days to clean up.

The culprit?

An aging tank — one of a pair that the company had slated for replacement months ago. In fact, the footings for the replacement tanks are already in place, waiting for the replacements to be set.

The hold up?

According to Al-Corn’s top brass, the company has been waiting nearly eight months for the Pollution Control Agency to grant permits for the replacement, which were finally stamped on Dec. 30 — the day before the collapse. The Pollution Control Agency has refuted that claim, maintaining that the permit approval took only six months, a window that also includes a 30-day public hearing period.

Al-Corn’s CEO Randall Doyal said that a similar permitting process in Iowa takes about a day, but the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency determined that since there was a change in the permit — Al-Corn planned to replace carbon steel tanks with new, industry-standard stainless steel tanks — the process would take longer.

While no one was injured in the collapse, the company will need to repair some structural damage incurred in the accident, and several temporary workers and outside contractors were also hired on to help with the clean-up efforts. On top of this, Al-Corn’s ethanol production will be slowed — albeit slightly, according to company officials — due to the accident.

It seems to us that the MPCA bears the brunt of the blame in this instance. If the agency had granted what amounted to a simple replacement of a tank designed to hold non-hazardous materials, this accident simply would not have happened.

We hope this spurs the MPCA, and other state agencies, to review the permitting process and perhaps streamline the process to better assist businesses in protecting both their employees and their bottom lines.

The next time something like this happens, the outcome could be much more tragic.

— Owatonna People’s Press. Jan. 4