Birmingham Business Journal – Cleaning the hazardous mess
Shannon Riley missed her sister’s debutante ball. While her baby sister was getting dolled up in Birmingham, Shannon was donning a hazmat suit and wading into the swampwaters of Florida, trying to help contain a chlorine gas leak caused by a freight train derailment.
“We didn’t have to worry about alligators,” she says with a laugh. Because a tanker had spilled 30,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the water, “the alligators were swimming for their lives.”
Like many modern entrepreneurs, Riley started her company – One Stop Environmental LLC – in her home in 1999.
“We parked our equipment in the carport and driveway until we bought the present location two years ago,” she says.
