Men Drop Other Duties to Respond As Denver Hazardous Incident Team
John R. Cashman
Personnel of the Denver Fire Department hazardous materials emergency response team don’t sit around the station waiting for calls. As a matter of fact, they don’t have a station to sit around.
Each team member holds down a regular assignment within the department 40 hours a week, but responds instantly 24 hours a day for hazardous materials incidents in 116 square miles of territory. Assistant Chief Donald Penn is drillmaster of the Denver Fire Department, while Captain Eldon Bullard is assistant drillmaster. Lieutenant John Marshall is the hazardous materials coordinator for the fire prevention buteau and Technician Miles Slocum is fire adviser to the Denver City and County Office of Emergency Preparedness.
In December 1978, Penn and Slocum traveled to Tennessee to observe the hazardous materials control program operated by the Tennessee Defense Civil Preparedness Office, then returned to Denver to report to Fire Chief Myrle Wise.
Denver is blessed with longstanding cooperat ion among local emergency response agencies represented on the Colorado Committee for Hazardous Materials Safety. They continually update and rewrite necessary response plans relating to hazardous materials. Agency assignments and responsibilities are clear cut and well maintained, but there is something extra in Denver—a feeling of mutual respect and support among agencies that is readily apparent to an outside observer.
Van obtained
Although the need for hazardous materials response equipment was well recognized by the City of Denver, the fire department operates on a fixed budget. The expense of a hazardous materials response vehicle would have placed it in a capital equipment category, where it would have had to compete for priority with new pumpers and other fire suppression apparatus. Early in 1979, the Denver Office of Emergency Preparedness, a coordinating agency designed to initiate and bring together the efforts of various response agencies, provided funding from a contingency fund reserved for the purchase of pressing emergency-need items to obtain a 3/4-ton Dodge van that was delivered to the Denver Fire Department in April 1979.
As soon as team members returned from two weeks of intensive hazardous materials response training in Nashville, they began outfitting the van. Denver Fire Department repair and carpentry shop personnel turned the vehicle into a response van by installing shelving, applying insulation, and performing a great deal of straightening, cutting, and altering. The vehicle was placed in service July 20, 1979.
The Denver hazardous materials team operates off the 911 central dispatch system. As soon as the first-in companies report that hazardous materials are involved, the dispatcher alerts the team through their radio pagers and he transmits as much information about the incident as is available.
Containment is goal
“The main idea for the team is containment,” noted Marshall. “Our training has stressed containment. Our primary concern is to contain the product and stabilize the scene. Once that is done, we have time to contact the shipper or manufacturer and work on decontamination, cleanup, and removal.
“Denver does not have any great amount of heavy manufacturing,” he continued, “but there are many facilities that store, handle, and process hazardous materials. Denver is a stopping point for many such materials. Much is sent here or travels through here but is not necessarily manufactured or used here.
“As for major users of hazardous materials,” Marshall added, “we have Rocky Mountain Arsenal at one corner of the city and Rocky Flats nuclear facility at another with a number of space and chemical companies in between. There is a limited number and amount of esoteric products in Denver, most notably carloads of hydrazine used as a rocket fuel and various radioactive materials used at the Rocky Flats facility.”
Nitric acid incident
During the five-month period of August through December 1979, the team responded to 32 incidents of which they actually worked 15 to some degree. Of the 15, five were considered major incidents. Three were major rail tank car spills, including a 9000-gallon tank car spill of 90 percent nitric acid solution that proved to be a three-day operation. At that particular incident, it was necessary to neutralize two ponds of nitric acid by bringing it to the proper pH with soda ash and then hauling away 240 tons of dirt for disposal.
“We had two ‘minor’ derailments— minor to the railroad but major to to us,” Slocum recalled. “One of these involved five tank cars of 33,000 gallons each of LPG. Three of the tank cars were lying on their sides. In other incidents, we’ve handled two leaking tank cars that were discovered by railroad security. One was a propane tanker with a leak in the valving system around the metering rod. An additional car that ultimately proved to be sound was stenciled ‘Anhydrous Ammonia’, but it actually contained LPG.
“Our toughest incident was the nitric acid car,” Slocum said. “Our hairiest incident involved a damaged LPG tanker that was moaning and groaning. Anytime you are dealing with a flammable gas vapor hazard, you have potential for serious problems. When we use a ‘catch-all’ arrangement to burn off a flammable gas, it is always a last resort. Under such circumstances, we monitor constantly and use water fog repeatedly to knock down excess vapor.”
In addition to initial hazardous materials response training in Nashville, the Denver team has participated in both long and short courses at the Colorado Training Institute and has attended a National Fire Protection Association seminar in Denver.
Train as a team
“We train as a team all the time,” explained Slocum, “using equipment off the rig, putting on the acid suits, and familiarizing ourselves with various materials. We borrowed a number of videotapes from the hazardous materials team of the Jacksonville, Fla., Fire Department that we have used extensively in our training. The Jacksonville guys were really helpful. They couldn’t do enough for us.
“One advantage of our present setup,” continued Slocum, “is that as training officer and drillmaster for the entire department, Chief Penn is as up to date as anyone can be on new types of foam and other materials and techniques that relate directly to hazardous materials control and containment. In addition, Chief Penn’s people have put together a pretty extensive hazardous materials familiarization program for all personnel in the Denver Fire Department. This program is conducted each day through different pumper and truck companies around the city and is administered through the training division.”
“Training is critical,” agreed Marshall, “but until you actually respond to a few incidents, your knowledge is limited. The more incidents you respond to, the more efficient and knowledgeable you become. There is no learning experience quite like working at an incident and being responsible for achieving containment and control. The handson, actual incident situation is just so forceful a learning experience that you almost hope for more so you can hone your skills.
“The more you learn, the more you become aware of possible corrective measures that can be used in a specific situation. Once you have worked with a specific commodity &nd developed a healthy respect for its characteristics and destructive capacity, you are far better qualified to deal with that commodity a second time.
Reality needed in training
“The more closely hazardous materials schools are able to replicate actual situations, the more successful such schools will be in preparing trainees for the real world,” Marshall declared. “We just completed two weeks at the Colorado Training Institute where they had mock-ups and cutaways, plus components of tank car gaging devices, valves, and metering rods we could manipulate and play with in a safe atmosphere. This was extremely helpful. You need both the hands-on training to the extent it can be provided in a classroom, and you need to respond to a few incidents.
“An incident helps you to realize how little you know and how much there is to learn. An incident can be the greatest motivator a hazardous materials response team will ever have,” Marshall commented.
“Our van is as fully loaded as it can be,” noted Penn. “We now have to be very selective as to what goes into the van because nothing more will fit in unless we are willing to take something out. We rely heavily on the regular pumper companies for any additional equipment we may need at a particular incident. For example, we carry high expansion foam and a foam generator in the van, but we rely on the pumper companies to supply us with hose lines and water. We always have a regular company on-scene to provide backup.”
Communications equipment
“We have some unique communications in the van that other fire departments might be interested in,” Slocum commented. “Our walkie-talkies have a patching capability that allows us to punch a code number to obtain access to any telephone number. The van is equipped with a limited-access UHF direction and control channel that we use at an incident. When we don full acid/gas/entry suits equipped with bone-conducting microphones at the back of the mask, all we have to do is drop one arm to activate a pressure switch and we are in communication with each other and can relay continuous information to our incident commander, Don Penn.
“We can be standing in a shower of hazardous commodity from a ruptured tank car here in Denver and be talking directly with the CHEMTREC communicator in Washington, D.C., or with the tank car designer in another part of the country. You can’t ask for more complete communications than that.
“There are four portables in the van,” continued Slocum. “The mayor, the police chief, and Denver Fire Chief Myrle Wise each has one, as do the directors of health and hospitals, public works, and safety. There are also eight of these units with the special services unit of the Denver Police Department for operational situations. The frequency is not an everyday use frequency. It is always available for special operations.”
In addition, the van has a 110-volt, 550-watt inverter to permit operation of a weather information unit. Denver’s location within a natural bowl seems to play havoc with wind direction. At one recent spill, the wind shifted 360 degrees with sizable variations in velocity during a period of 30 minutes. The weather information unit sits atop a 14-foot mast that is mounted to a crossbeam as needed and provides moment-to-moment readouts on a digital meter in the van for wind speed, direction, barometric pressure and temperature.
Tape recorder used
“We also have a tape recorder that operates off the same 110-volt power supply.” Slocum added. “This is very helpful when we are receiving information from CHEMTREC, the car designer or shipper. Anytime you relay messages through a third party, there is always a chance the message will be garbled or misunderstood. One incorrect letter in the spelling of a product can make a world of difference. With the tape recorder, we can be sure what was said. We don’t have to rely on memory or be worried about misunderstandings.”
The Denver Fire Department maintains a resource list of heavy construction equipment available from all sources within city government. Whenever the needs of a particular situation exceed these resources, the hazardous materials team can fall back on a contract recently renewed between the Denver Office of Emergency Preparedness and the Associated General Contractors that is recognized in the city disaster plan. A simple telephone call can obtain any type of heavy equipment from a crane to a dump truck in a matter of minutes. The only charge to the city is for the operator’s time. Use of the actual equipment is provided as an emergency public service by the Associated General Contractors.
The hazardous materials emergency response team of the Denver Fire Department forms an important component of a multi-agency response plan within the Mile High City. In Denver, interagency coordination and cooperation play a strong role in hazardous materials containment and control efforts.
