EMERGENCY RESPONSE TO CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL AGENTS - CHAPTER 8 ppsx

8 ©2000 CRC Press LLC Industry and Commercial Response Teams PCR CHEMICALS, GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA John E. Hudson is Manager of Safety and Emergency Preparedness at PCR Chem- icals, a small chemical manufacturing company that focuses on organosilicone and organofluorine chemistry. “We make a lot of silicone intermediates such as the products in shampoo that make your hair shine, silicones that are beta blockers in pharmaceuticals, and a silicone that coats every Intel processor chip. We’ve devel- oped a drug called ‘5 Flurouracell’ that is a basic chemotherapy building block, and we manufacture specialty heavy fluids used in gyroscopes for the U.S. Department of Defense. Basically, we run a diversified batch operation. “Most of our production is market driven. People come to us and say, ‘Can you do this?’ Our R&D department develops the product and tests it. We put it in production if it is a viable product. Other companies come to us and ask if we can manufacture a chemical product cheaper than they can do it for themselves. Very often, we can because we already have the infrastructure that would support the product. If they were to make it themselves, they would have to invest a great deal of capital where we have already spent the necessary capital and can easily manu- facture these products. “We have had incidents here, one in 1991 and one in 1994, which prompted us to coordinate an emergency response team as a first response team for incidents at the plant. Our biggest problem can be a runaway reaction that results in a fire. We can now make the initial response and keep the situation under control until the Gainesville Fire and Rescue gets here to help us out. As a result of the ‘94 incident, we purchased an industrial foam pumper with 1000 gallons of foam aboard which gives us a capability not only to fight a fire but to suppress vapors. Many of our products are so toxic that this unit has really helped us with vapor suppression.” On June 17, 1994 a release of trichlorosilane at PCR resulted in the evacuation of 600 residents near the plant. Hundreds more were advised to shelter in place, and 148 were treated and released from local hospitals. The nearby airport was closed for four hours. “The emergency response team is purely voluntary and currently staffed by 42 persons with specific duties within our plant operations,” continues John Hudson. “Right now, we are in the process of training 17 persons to a Level 3 technician level. We began training with the Florida State Fire College located in Ocala about 35 miles south of here. Half of the team will be firefighters and half will be Haz Mat technicians, but all will be cross-trained so they can do any of the activities that are needed. ©2000 CRC Press LLC “Once a year, we open up the emergency response team for people who are interested in becoming volunteer members. They are usually brought in through the decon team which is a good place to get them involved. We will train them imme- diately through Level 1 and Level 2. Once a year, we offer a Level 3 course. As they work with decon, they participate as support people for the Haz Mat group. If they are interested in firefighting, we get them involved in some of the courses at the Fire College. It is purely a voluntary program. We don’t force anyone to go into any particular field. If they want to stay with the decon team, that is no problem. We continually have spills that the decon team, actually called ‘Decon and Spill Response,’ responds to as well as decontamination drills. “We have found it very advantageous to have a response team. We’ve had several near-misses that through quick response remained near misses. We are a 7-day, 3- shifts-a-day operation, and all our evening and night shifts are trained in either the fire program or the Haz Mat program. We have developed what we feel is an excellent relationship with the Gainesville Fire and Rescue Department. “When I came to work at PCR in 1993, I brought with me the good relationships I had with the fire department. I used to work in a teaching hospital at the University of Florida, and we had so many fire alarms at the hospital that firefighters would respond several times a month. When I joined PCR, our first column went bad shortly after my arrival. When the firefighters responded, they were afraid to come in the front gate. Rick Lust, who was Haz Mat Engineer with the fire department at the time, and I got together and decided that we should do some joint drills, preplans, and activities so the fire department was comfortable in coming out here. At the same time, we started working on our emergency response team here at PCR. “We had a group of five or six people who would respond prior to 1993, but they were not well trained. They were mostly chemists and persons who operated the vessels. We started a program to train everybody in the facility to the OSHA Level 1, the awareness level. Next, we trained everyone who was interested to the operations level so they could take defensive actions in their own work areas. At that point, we developed a training program that could be presented internally to train them for the Level 3, or technician level, under 29 CFR 1910.120 (9)(2). “We trained our personnel as responders with 160 hours of training, and we purchased about 45 sets of bunker gear, SCBA, and more support equipment so we could handle anything on a first response basis. We have some good fire training, but I don’t classify our personnel as firefighters. All we can do is hold the line until the Gainesville Fire and Rescue gets here. We make our equipment available to the fire department, and we train together at least four times a year so they are familiar with our equipment and we with theirs. “The PCR emergency response team can provide 40 people who are Level 3 Haz Mats who work with hazardous materials on a daily basis. We have nine Ph.D. chemists on the team so risk assessment is one of the things we do on the fly which really stymies most Haz Mat teams. The expertise we have in dealing with chemicals gives us an advantage and gives the Gainesville Fire and Rescue a big advantage because they have our pagers and home phone numbers so they can call us any time of the day or night. If they need us to respond, we will. If they need information, ©2000 CRC Press LLC we will supply that information. It’s been a great relationship for the two of us, and we do a lot of training together. I would certainly recommend that relationship, and I do every time I get an opportunity. “PCR’s Level 3 responders have four, 4-hour refresher courses a year to keep them up to speed. We have about six Level 4 persons, the specialist level, ‘plug and patch’ people, and we are continuously doing exercises for them. Sometimes, damaged containers will come in and we will treat them as an exercise for the specialists. “We have people assigned to roles and trained to fill those particular roles. For instance, a safety officer role in a fire department response can be filled by any command officer. We have a Ph.D. chemist to fill our safety officer role, and his designee is a Ph.D. chemist as well. They can analyze what is happening at an incident, and we have trained them through the incident command system so they recognize how this system works. But they also bring Ph.D level knowledge of adverse effects as in a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) or a flashover. We use the same system for decon. While the fire department will assign an officer to the decon team, we permanently appoint a deputy chief for decon. He or his designee will be available 24 hours a day.” The PCR emergency response team has been available for off-site incidents in the past. “It’s good for the community to have an asset like our team,” says Hudson, “and we have responded off-site a few times in the past. In October of 1996 a smaller chemical company here in Gainesville burned. They had a lot of cyanides so we supplied our truck with foam and about eight team members, four or five to operate the truck and the rest to provide oversight on the chemicals involved. I was the incident commander of our unit and worked closely and communicated with the incident commander for the other chemical company. “My management gave me permission to take the team off-site for that incident and turned the response team over to me. If a public emergency type of incident proves to be something we can’t handle, we won’t do it. We’ve talked about a mutual aid agreement, but decided that was not particularly necessary. We also talked about doing a memorandum of understanding, and I believe we are going to do that to address the issues of cost recovery and liabilities. We don’t ask for any pay or liability coverage if we pump 600 gallons of foam, but we would like someone to reimburse us for the cost of the foam. We make an incident-by-incident decision for off-site response. For instance, a pentaborane disposal issue arose recently. I was asked whether we could provide some people to operate as a backup for the effort. I said absolutely not because my people have no training in new toxins like pentaborane. We can help in some ways, but we are not going to respond to a pentaborane incident. “For a response at PCR we have material safety data sheets for all the raw materials and intermediates,” relates Hudson. “Some chemicals go through several steps to move from a raw material to a finished good. Depending on where it is in the process, we can pull information about that chemical. We also have response information on our local area network. Most of our people are pretty familiar with the chemicals in their areas; and we have people from every area of the plant involved ©2000 CRC Press LLC with the response team including people from our laboratories and the R&D depart- ment. We have plant-wide coverage so that in every area we have personnel familiar with what’s going on. That expertise certainly helps a response. That’s one of the reasons I have such great respect for the fire department. When they leave the station, they never know what they are going to be running into so they have to be prepared for anything and everything. “Another PCR staff member and I are members of the Local Emergency Plan- ning Committee and are familiar with the enhanced hazard analysis that’s been done in the community. We have used the LEPC as sort of an information dissemination program. Chief Williams was the LEPC chair for a couple of years. I succeeded him as the chair and have held the job for five years. The LEPC covers seven counties in the northeast fire district, about 7000 square miles in total, and keeps all of our fire community aware of current issues. The LEPC has been active in making training available to the rural and volunteer departments. “As a company, we’ve done exercises and participated in rural areas up to 65 to 70 miles from Gainesville, and we feel it is very important that we share our expertise. We have leadership in the company that will allow us to do this, and we have people in the community structure like myself chairing local LEPC. I am also a member of the state emergency response commission, and a member of the Florida Fire Chiefs Association Emergency Services Coalition as well as a member of the Florida Transcaer Committee (Transportation Community Awareness Emergency Response sponsored by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and other national associations). “Our LEPC has 35 members who range from persons who have been there since the committee began in 1987 to folks who came in the last year. We have little turnover in our LEPC. Once somebody comes on, he tends to stay for five to six years. Other LEPCs in Florida have a pretty high turnover rate. The most active committee is their membership committee, while with our LEPC, the public infor- mation committee is the most active group. As an example, a week in late February was designated ‘Hazardous Materials Awareness Week’ in Florida. Employers using extremely hazardous substances from the EPA list had to submit their Tier II reports to the state capital in Tallahassee. They must report to the state what chemicals they have on hand, where the chemicals are stored, volumes they have on hand, and the average daily volumes on hand. The governor published a proclamation. We sent it to 44 communities and municipalities and they published it in their areas. “An incident occurred at the male correctional facility a year or so ago. The Governor’s staff appointed me as an investigator through the LEPC. Well, I learned a lot doing it. I learned I never want to do that again. The difficulties of doing hazardous materials work are compounded by the difficulties of working in an environment such as a prison. Something had permeated the air and made a lot of people sick. We discovered in the investigation that one of the guards had released prisoner control gas. It permeates clothing and stays with a person. Prison officials did not do any decon. They took all the injured to a hospital and contaminated all the ambulances and the hospital emergency room. They wanted to do what was right, but they just didn’t know what was the right thing to do. Of course, that ©2000 CRC Press LLC information didn’t endear us to the prison superintendent until he learned that we could help him with good information and training. We have done Level 1 and Level 2 training for their staff, and made arrangements for them to take the ‘Hazwoper’ course. The head of the corrections department has now mandated such training for all his staff in Florida. “We are continuously working on making our chemical processes safer. We had a trichlorosilane incident in June of 1994. A hose ruptured and the product, which is water reactive, ignited when the humidity that day reached about 95%. If we had an initial response capability for fire fighting at that time, we could have gone in there and resolved the incident in less than an hour. As it turned out, the incident took about seven hours to get under control because the fire department waited until they could make a safe response before going in. Presently, we use remote-activated valves. Every set of valving and pumps in the plant can be shut down from another location. That system was instituted because of that particular incident. We have also poured a lot of concrete containment way, far beyond what the regulations require, so that if something should break we can keep it from going into the soil or to the waterways. “We also have a number of suppression systems so that if anything that is not water reactive does give way, we can immediately flood it with water. If it is water reactive, we have five foam systems with which we can lay a blanket of foam. We use foam as much for vapor suppression as we do for fire suppression. Many of our chemicals will liberate HCl (hydrochloric acid) vapor which can be very damaging to mucous membranes and respiratory systems. It important that we are able to suppress it.” A fire department Haz Mat team is now required to have medical surveillance for response personnel. How does that work within industry? “We require it,” continues Hudson. “It’s part of our response plan. Before you go into any activity, you have your blood pressure and heart rate checked. They are checked again when you come out. Every month when we have an emergency response team meeting, we do checks. If we have an exposure during an incident, we send that person or persons to our company doctor. Only one person has had to have blood gases drawn. I think it was such a bad experience that no one will ever again say that they were exposed. We have had one of our response team members go to a community college to become an emergency medical technician. We hope to send another one this summer as well as one in the fall, so we will have at least three EMTs. One person on site is a paramedic and can make the initial medical response. We are working with the Gainesville Fire/Rescue Department on a first responder course which covers basic life support. Twenty people will go through that course. We are trying to get ourselves in a position where we can take care of ourselves and then help the fire department if they need help. “We keep about 20 Level A suits and 35 to 40 Level B suits on hand. We only use them for a specified period before we paint a big ‘T’ on the backs of them and they become training suits. We supply a lot of support to the fire department because their resources are usually limited to half a dozen or so suits. One of the areas we cover in our Level 3 course is how to dress. It sounds rather funny, but it is very ©2000 CRC Press LLC important to know how to get in and out of protective clothing without damaging it. If we have an event that requires a Level A dress out, we use disposable suits because it makes more sense than trying to decon permanent Level A clothing. “We have quite a few chemical computer programs such as Sax’s Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials. For most of our emergency response we use CAMEO because that is what the fire department uses. Using the same program prevents a lot of confusion. We had looked at the possibility of ordering the CHARM module which is supposedly one of the more sophisticated programs, but the more we thought about it the more we realized that it was not a good choice since the fire department doesn’t have it. If we are going to interface with them, we need to do what they are doing. We have several laptops that have CAMEO on them so we can go off-site to incident command and help the fire department with modeling and tasks like that. The Gainesville Fire and Rescue Department is getting ready to put a cellular FAX machine on their Haz Mat response vehicle which will give us the ability to get information at the command post. “We have also used ALOHA (a segment of CAMEO) and it was pretty accurate. As a matter of fact, we were so pleased with it that we are going to use CAMEO and ALOHA for our dispersion modeling under the Clean Air Act 112R. I was at the Chemical Process Safety meeting in New Orleans recently, and the companies were all talking about what program they were going to use such as SAFER, FAST, and CHARM. These are $15,000 to $35,000 proprietary software systems. I men- tioned CAMEO and ALOHA. Others responded that CAMEO and ALOHA are not very sophisticated programs. I replied that may be, but our responders are using CAMEO and ALOHA and it is very important that we are able to interface with them on a basis they can understand. Some of the people there said their first responder groups used CAMEO and maybe that’s what they needed to use. I urged them to think about it and talk to their responders to help them make a decision. That’s one of the reasons we started using the same terminology as fire departments. It makes sense for us to converse with them in a way they can understand and we can understand. We feel very comfortable with our relationship to the fire depart- ment. It is a positive thing and I think it is good for the community. Within the seven county area, the Gainesville Fire and Rescue Department, PCR, Inc., PSC in White Spring, the Hamilton County Fire Department, the former Proctor and Gamble pulp mill in Buckeye, and the Perry Fire Department, all use the same terminology.” TEAM-1 ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES, HAMILTON, ONTARIO, CANADA The July 1997 fire and toxic cloud at Plastimet Recycling in Hamilton, where at least 400 tons of plastic burned and released gases raised serious questions about the dangers to people who live or work near the 630 waste transfer sites in the Contact: John E. Hudson, Manager of Safety and Emergency Preparedness, PCR Chemical Company, P.O. Box 1466, Gainesville, FL 32602-1466; 904-376-8246, Ext. 284; 904-373-7503 (Fax). ©2000 CRC Press LLC province of Ontario. The fire burned for 77 hours, and an estimated 5,548,000 gallons of water were poured on the incident site. A commercial response contractor was on site recovering contaminated water for 144 hours after the start of the blaze. The toxic substances that were released into the air included dioxin, any of a group of compounds known as dibenzo-p-dioxins. When tested on laboratory ani- mals, dioxins were found to be among the more toxic synthetic chemicals having an oral LD 50 of 0.022 mg/kg in male rats and 0.045 mg/kg in female rats. Dioxin became widely known as a potential danger after the herbicide 2,4,5-T exploded at a manufacturing plant in Seveso, Italy years ago. Many workers were exposed, and vegetation in the town was destroyed. The workers developed chloracne, a disfig- uring skin condition characterized by the appearance of blackheads, cysts, follicu- litis, and scars. The small Missouri town of Times Beach was evacuated and eventually aban- doned by the EPA in 1983 when high levels of dioxin were found on unpaved city streets. The accumulation of contaminated oil which had been spread on the streets to control the dust caused Times Beach to become a ghost town. Dioxin is known to be a carcinogen. The Firefighters Handbook of Hazardous Materials lists its toxicity for lungs and toxicity for skin as high, potentially causing permanent injury or death. For the Disaster-Atmosphere category, dioxin is judged a level 4, with a cautionary statement that “many factors influence this point, such as degree and area of confinement, air and wind currents, type and scope of involvement, etc. and is a relative value only.” One sample, taken from a stream of wet ash flowing from the main part of the Plastimet fire, contained 25,000 ppt toxic equivalent of dioxin. Another sample, sooty residue in a stream of water running across a nearby street, contained 7600 ppt. Any area with dioxin concentrations higher than 1000 ppt is considered unfit for industrial use according to provincial guidelines. In high amounts, dioxins may be linked to medical problems including cancer, suppression of the immune system, and reproductive problems. About 200 firefighters fought the fire at Plastimet. About half have reported health problems including respiratory difficulties, nasal and throat irritation, skin rashes, eye infections and fatigue. Despite their protective gear, many had skin peel off their hands and feet. The International Association of Fire Fighters demanded a provincial investigation stating, “More than two months after the fire, many of the firefighters at the scene continue to experience the ill effects of toxic exposure … the Plastimet fire has raised serious safety concerns not only for the Hamilton fire fighters, but also for the citizens of the community … exposure to burning polyvinyl chlorides (PVCs) raises the real possibility that the fire fighters and citizens will be stricken with serious illness in the future.” Firefighters are really “burned,” in more ways than one, with the politics that have gone on since the fire. They are worried that chemicals such as dioxin and benzene, both of which cause cancer, could cause drastic health problems as years go by and the Plastimet fire is all but forgotten. The fire department has refused to pay for liver and kidney tests to ensure that vital organs have not been damaged, and the Ontario Health Insurance Plan usually does not pay the $350 required for such exams. The Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers informed ©2000 CRC Press LLC Hamilton-area physicians that such tests would be appropriate only if firefighters were showing visible signs of organ problems. The fire department has said it will pay only for tests sought by doctors. The firefighters are left in a Catch-22 position. They have no baseline medical data after the Plastimet fire to judge whether the fire damaged certain organs. So far, no medical follow-up has been authorized for the firefighters. Other pollutants at the Plastimet fire with levels that rose sharply and then fell off were carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrogen chloride (which mixes with moisture in the air or in a person’s lungs to form hydrochloric acid), vinyl chloride and benzene. At its peak, hydrogen chloride in the air was almost six times the accepted government standard. The vinyl chloride peaked at 2.5 times the provincial standard for air quality, but the standard is set based on long-term exposure, and temporary, short-term exposure to higher levels is not a risk according to a report released by the Ministry of Environment and Energy. The readings for benzene peaked at 250 ppb; the normal range in the Hamiliton area for benzene is 1 to 8 ppb. Mitchell Gibbs is manager of emergency services at TEAM-1 Environmental Services Inc. located in Hamilton, Ontario. This commercial spill response contrac- tor provides Canada-wide incident response, contingency planning, and Haz Mat and confined space training. In Ontario, TEAM-1 has dispatch centers located in Hamilton, Burlington, Toronto, and London. About 30 minutes after the start of the Plastimet fire, TEAM-1 was asked by the Hamilton-Wentworth Region to respond. “Our main goal was to recover the water runoff that was deemed toxic,” says Gibbs. “Responders put 210 million liters of water on the fire. It was estimated that 10% of that was lost through vaporization leaving a balance of 189 million liters. Fifty percent of that went into the storm sewer system and allowed for direct discharge into the harbor. The other 50% went into the sanitary sewer system and to the sewer plant. The amount recovered compared to the amount put on the fire wasn’t very good. The excess was a concern for a lot of people. Some of the streets were under two feet of water; the railroad track lines were covered. Obviously, the runoff water carried a lot of toxins: dioxins, lead, zinc, chrome, magnesium — a lot of heavy metals. “The site was an industrial location. A smelter had been onsite for the past 50 or 60 years and had been abandoned for ten years. The location was deemed a highly contaminated site even before it was rented to a person who recycled poly- vinyl chloride. The exact amount of polyvinyl chloride on site is still under question. The site had numerous violations under the fire code, and the company that operated the PVC recycling was approximately $850,000 in arrears on taxes. A lot of issues relate to that fire. A lot of people claim it never should have happened. A lot of questions surfaced about how the fire was handled and how much hydrochloric acid fallout occurred. The big question is, ‘shouldn’t there have been an evacuation?’ “The alarm was called in by a fire department tactical unit out doing building inspections. They came around a corner and discovered the fire, which was called in as a ‘still’ alarm (common term for when an active fire is found, not when a fire is called into the station). Immediately, trucks were dispatched from a station two kilometers away. Response time would have been less than two minutes. Within 10 to 12 minutes, however, the entire facility was fully engulfed in flames. Responders ©2000 CRC Press LLC suspect a carrying agent accelerated the fire; adapters and beams could have been contaminated with a carrying agent such as zinc dust that could have caused the fire to travel so quickly. Off-duty fire department personnel were called in to respond. At that point, it was declared a major fire with environmental impact. The ministry of environment, the ministry of health, all regulatory agencies, the mayor, and all politicians responded. “Advice was given on how to handle the fire,” remembers Gibbs. “At that point, the fire department made an external attack, no personnel were allowed inside the building. It became a ‘surround and drown fire,’ a common term familiar to all the agencies involved. “All two acres of the site were involved. Firefighters placed a number of aerial trucks around the area and flooded the site. The building on the site collapsed on the PVC which led to a lot of problems. The firefighters were not able to direct water at the piles of PVC. Heavy equipment was eventually brought in to remove pieces of the roof from tightly wound vinyl and other PVC products. The fire was very intense and stubborn. “The fire service was taking advice and recommendations from numerous agen- cies such as the ministry of the environment, the directors of health, and the director of emergency preparedness. They determined that evacuation wasn’t necessary the night of the fire. However, three days after the start of the fire, an evacuation was ordered because of a temperature inversion which would not allow the toxic plume to escape and because of the amount of toxic flooding. Over 77 hours, the plume migrated approximately 30 kilometers affecting many areas. Initially, the wind kept switching. First, the plume headed south, but during that first night, we experienced at least 10 to 15 wind switches at a minimum of 180° each including some that changed 360°. Such movement caused the plume to flood the command post with fallout. You could never get a safe position. “TEAM 1 was on site to recover the toxic waste. It was a massive task utilizing the services of numerous carriers, but Laidlaw Environmental was the main responder. At one point we had 26 large-scale industrial vacuum trucks on site trying to recover water at different points. Luckily, the main area collection point was a low-lying area on the street. It probably covered a good acre. Had it been on a hillside, we would never have been able to recover the water. The decision to pick up the contaminated water was made by the regional sewer people because it was obvious that any water in this known toxic site would have elevated levels of heavy metals and hydrocarbons. Knowing that polyvinyl chloride was involved, officials decided right away that some form of environmental recovery would be necessary. “The Regional Municipality of Hamilton does not clean up spills in their area. They contract with private industry and oversee the cleanup done by private industry. TEAM 1 Environmental has a contract with the city of Hamilton to respond to chemical spills and similar incidents. We knew immediately that hydrochloric acid and dioxin would be the products of PVC combustion. These were the two main concerns at the Plastimet Recycling fire. Dioxins, of course, were a huge concern. The problem that we ran into was that dioxin test results were not available for 48 hours from the point of sampling whereas hydrochloric acid results were immedi- ©2000 CRC Press LLC ately available. The fire started at 7:30 p.m. and through on-site analysis of the waste water, we knew by 2:00 a.m. that the water was toxic. The Ministry of Environment, for whatever reason, could not respond with certain high-end equip- ment until 5:30 a.m.” Mitchell Gibbs was asked if TEAM 1 members have been called on to respond to a chemical agent like a poison gas or a biological substance such as anthrax or typhus. “We have a couple of pathological biological laboratories in Ontario that retain our services. A spill there would be treated no differently from a chemical spill such as chlorine or ammonia. The same type of suits would be worn with the same types of precautions, same manpower, same chemical setup, and the same system. The suits we have would protect us against most of these agents, and we have a careful monitoring program for the specific agent we might be working with. In 14 years of doing this type of work, I’ve only had two occurrences involving an unknown. We have a workplace hazardous materials information system in Canada. Anything that’s in an industrial plant has to have a material safety data sheet attached to it or in an accessible place. Very rarely do you get called to a drum that’s in the middle of the road with nobody around.” When called to the scene of a hazardous materials incident, TEAM 1 personnel make use of a standard operational guidance that was designed after the National Fire Protection Association Standards 471 (Recommended Practice for Responding To Hazardous Materials Incidents) and 472 (Standards of Professional Competence of Responders To Hazardous Materials Incidents). Mitchell Gibbs functions in the role of the incident commander, and Debbie Vanderlip is the health and safety coordinator. “Upon arrival, we report to a pre-assigned command post to gather information. At the point that the two of us agree we have sufficient information, we would establish a plan of attack for the situation. Debbie would be responsible for selecting personal protective equipment and protocol. From that point we would enter the site to confirm what has been reported to us, exit the site, and report the findings to the overall incident commander. From that I would either readjust my protocol or form a new protocol, depending on the nature of the incident. We subsequently re-enter and mitigate the situation. “At any time during that process, we have provisions to alter our original plans based on our findings. If we get in there and find an additional agent involved, we can remove ourselves. At the same time, if we find that the air quality or the risk level is less, we can degrade our suiting level. Downgrading our suits can be very important. The very last thing you want to do is to work in an encapsulated suit needlessly. If you can get the incident response down to a hard hat and safety glasses, it is much easier to do work at such a site, but that can only be arranged when you have accurate findings and accurate air quality readings.” TEAM-1 Environmental Services, Inc. provides Canada-wide emergency response to government, industry, and transportation agencies and businesses. Spe- cifically, they handle tractor trailer/tanker truck roll-overs, Haz Mat spill response, Level A–D chemical handling, hydrocarbon spill cleanup, high hazard tank cleanout, radioactive incidents, explosive materials control, high angle/confined space work, [...]... however, a chemical is a chemical whether presented in a terrorist attack or in some other arena.” Contact: Gary D Gordon, Toxicologist, Haz Mat Response, Security and Fire Protection, The Boeing Company, P.O Box 3707, MS 3 4-6 7, Seattle, WA 981 2 4-2 207; 25 3-6 5 7 -8 657; 25 3-6 579 988 (Fax); 20 6-9 4 9-2 529 (Cellular) ©2000 CRC Press LLC ... with city and county agencies, police departments, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Secret Service over the years pertaining specifically to chemicals, chemical impact, and chemical potentials.” Does Boeing have membership on the SERC (State Emergency Response Commission) for the State of Washington, or an... classroom and hands-on training and work on specific areas that are critical to maintaining the competency of the individual technicians Each of our plant sites has an emergency response coordinator For example, Bill Christie is the fabric division response coordinator These people form an interface between the company fire department and the facilities group to ensure that training, activities, and equipment... dismantling, low profile rapid response units, abandoned property mitigation, contingency spill plan consulting, and training facility services, with fully trained, certified, and insured personnel Contact: Mitchell Gibbs, Manager of Emergency Services, TEAM-1 Environmental Services, South Ontario Division, 1650 Upper Ottawa Street, Hamilton, Ontario, L8W 3P2 Canada; 905 38 3-5 550; 90 5-5 7 4-0 492 (Fax) THE BOEING... our first team efforts in 1 989 we did not have a centralized focus or a standardization process Some teams opted to use MSAs and some chose Scott We have cross-trained all team personnel, both in initial training and ongoing training, in both types of air packs.” The Puget Sound area Boeing Haz Mat teams use Responder CSM personal protective suits, 8 to 10 Level A suits, and 8 to 10 Level B suits For decontamination... tarps and off-the-shelf wading pools If these become contaminated, they dispose of them as hazardous waste and don’t try to decontaminate them “We have a pretty wide range of air monitoring equipment,” says Gordon “We have an infrared spectrophotometer that gives us a pretty wide range of capabilities for detection of organic materials We also have a laptop integrator that has a library of 400 chemicals... about chemical protective clothing, for example, they would purchase the suits The individual sites have agreed to purchase the Haz Mat equipment on the response van, and we have agreed to maintain the equipment and the van “Several years ago we made an effort to install CAMEO in our hazardous materials response vehicles Unfortunately, with the amount of jarring, heat, cold, dampness, and rough handling... chief officers, and inspection officers have all been through the hazardous materials incident command training class We try to make the fire departments and Boeing teams as seamless as possible “Our response system is guided by the greatest concern for the health and welfare of our response personnel, both firefighters and facility representatives Response teams in our facilities strictly adhere to the nationally... firefighters understands the overhead crane systems, how they work, and where they are located They also understand aircraft, one of our key businesses “The Boeing fire department also maintains emergency medical services Over 80 % of our firefighters are emergency medical technicians with AED (automatic external defibrillation units) Currently, the King County save-rate is in the neighborhood of 10 to 12% for cardiac... respiratory protective equipment, containment control techniques, the incident command system, and chemistry During the final two days, we integrate all these subjects with a hands-on scenario implementing the incident command system, recognition and identification of the problem, mitigation, termination and demobilization We feel confident that when they finish training they have the skills necessary to perform . D. Gordon, Toxicologist, Haz Mat Response, Security and Fire Protection, The Boeing Company, P.O. Box 3707, MS 3 4-6 7, Seattle, WA 981 2 4-2 207; 25 3-6 5 7 -8 657; 25 3-6 5 7- 9 988 (Fax); 20 6-9 4 9-2 529 (Cellular). . findings and accurate air quality readings.” TEAM-1 Environmental Services, Inc. provides Canada-wide emergency response to government, industry, and transportation agencies and businesses. Spe- cifically,. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Secret Service over the years pertaining specifically to chemicals, chemical impact, and chemical potentials.” Does Boeing have membership on the SERC (State Emergency