Hazardous Materials Response Unit Maintains Versatility on Low Budget
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The hazardous materials response team in Guilford County, N.C., has learned to be versatile when it comes to acquiring specialized equipment. Only a portion of it is provided through the normal budget process, so the rest has to be homemade, borrowed or sought as a gift.
Guilford County covers 641 square miles around the City of Greensboro. The Guilford County Department of Emergency Services includes separate divisions for fire, ambulance/EMS and emergency management. The fire service division has been involved in oil spill containment and hazardous materials response since 1975 and has responded to approximately 200 incidents.
One of the largest inland bulk storage and handling networks in the world is located in Guilford County, according to Charles W. Porter, director of the emergency services department. Over 500 million gallons of flammable liquids are stored in 200 tanks within the county.
“Guilford County is somewhat unique in its transportation systems,” said D. Jerold Stack, deputy chief of operations for the Guilford County Fire Service Division and a charter member of the Guilford County Hazardous Materials Team. “We have the main line of the Southern Railroad on its way north to Washington, D.C., and 1-40 and 1-85 junction here at Greensboro.
Although Guilford County’s 37 fire stations are part of a basically volunteer department, fire marshal’s office and communications staff are paid personnel. All eight members of the dualpurpose oil spill containment/hazardous materials team are paid personnel of at least fire inspector grade (comparable to captain).
Budget restrictions
Faced with budget restrictions, the team has done a heck of a lot on its own. “We were able to get chemical suits through the normal budget process, but a lot of our our equipment is homemade,” explains Stack. “We can do a great deal with a half-dozen S-hooks and a little blacksmithing. We have our own maintenance shop that so far has been able to fashion what we have needed. Every vehicle assigned to team members carries homemade dome lid clamps that have proven extremely useful. These are hooked over the dome lid of a tank truck, then screwed down to apply pressure and force the lid tightly against the dome lid gasket to stop leakage through the lid.”
The team’s oil spill containment trailer, originally donated by the Greensboro Oil Jobbers Association, has been stocked with absorbent materials, fence posts, chicken wire, piping for inverted siphons, recovery drums and assorted containment equipment. Their fire investigation special hazards (FISH) truck, a combination hazardous materials response vehicle and command post, is a 1962 International with only 3871 actual miles. It was purchased as surplus for one dollar. It too is loaded with a variety of equipment.
Color-coded items
A large, industrial-type air compressor, used to operate air-driven pumps (skimmers) in flammable vapor atmospheres, was bought for $100. Maintenance shop personnel rebuilt and rewired it, installed it on an old ambulance chassis, and added much larger tires so it can be taken off-road. A self-contained light unit was built using another old ambulance chassis and a generator obtained from surplus. Various-sized metal compression plates and heavy rubber patches, used for sealing tank leaks as well as chains, are all cut in the maintenance shop. The metal compression plates are maleable steel. If they are not of the correct contour to fit a given tank, a sledgehammer is used to bend them to the desired shape. Chains are precut in 5, 10 and 20-foot lengths and then color-coded by length and diameter. A color-code chart is posted on the side of the FISH truck so that at an incident scene where manpower may be spread pretty thin, a team member can send a person not familiar with the equipment and have him select the proper length/diameter of chain by color alone.
Another homemade device is a Scott Air-Pak tank with an air hose and 2 1/2-inch connector. Attached to an old 2 1/2-inch fire hose plugged at one end, it makes a quickly inflated containment boom for still water.
In addition to making their own wind socks, S-clamps, dome lid clamps and assorted plugging devices such as a rubber ball and toggle bolt plug (used often for leaks in truck saddle tanks; make the hole big enought to accept the toggle bolt, then screw the ball down over the home for a temporary but effective patch.)—there is The Thing.
“That’s Porter’s invention,” says Stack, “a 500-gpm nozzle we operate off a 2 1/2-inch hose when large volumes of water are required. It is just a portable, high-volume nozzle made in our shop, but it really works.”
Outside assistance
“We have a storage depot where we keep our bales of straw, additional absorbent materials, and sections of pipe for inverted siphon dams,” Porter says. “Also, Colonial Pipeline has a trailer truck loaded with absorbent material that we can use. Shell Oil Company has its own team, yet all of its equipment is available to us on an emergency basis simply by hitching up to their trailer and towing it where we need it.
“Industry in this area has been fantastic to work with,” adds Porter. “We worked up a list of all kinds of heavy equipment—backhoes, front-end loaders, bulldozers—available to us from private industry 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For truckloads of dirt or sand, the department of transportation will respond at our request. Also, there is a mutual-aid agreement between and among Guilford County, Greensboro, High Point and all the surrounding counties. Any equipment belonging to one is available to all the others.”
Access to information
“Every vehicle we have carries a copy of the new DOT manual,” explains Stack, “and I carry the condensed CHRIS manual (of the U. S. Coast Guard) in the back of my car. Our alarm room has a very extensive hazardous materials library. The vehicles of all members, as well as the FISH truck, have the capability to patch by radio-telephone to CHEMTREC, so we do not have relay through a dispatcher and risk the misspelling of a chemical, or have to rely on someone who might not fully understand what we are dealing with. We have the capability to talk directly to the manufacturer, carrier, tank builder, or CHEMTREC as needed and provide them information directly from the incident scene.”
“Since the Greensboro/Guilford County Radiological Assistance Team operates out of our FISH truck during a radiological emergency, we maintain expensive Eberline radiation detection gear that responds to alpha, beta and gamma radiation,” explained Stack, who along with Captain Dan Shumate of the Greensboro Fire Department serves as assistant team leader of the multiagency radiological team.
Because Stack is also safety officer for the county’s 1800 employees and has an extensive background in safety, he goes on-scene with the hazardous materials team strictly as a safety officer to ensure that actions taken are performed in a safe and positive manner. Both Porter and Stack feel the concept of a safety officer should be considered by other hazardous materials response teams.
Planning
Stack continues: “We have a plan for all oil terminal facilities, showing capacity and location of each tank, the type of tank, where the drainage is, the railheads and sidings within the terminal, electrical and mechanical shutoffs, fire protection equipment, roadways, office buildings, fences and gates, hydrant locations and size of mains. All such special plans are maintained within a book on the apparatus.”
The diagrams for such plans are professionally drawn to scale with extensive detail.
“A notable aspect of response in the county is that we are often faced with potential entry of chemicals into water supplies and sources,” Stack emphasizes. “Basically, all the drinking water used in the county originates within the county. In a large percentage of our incidents we get involved with damming and installation of an inverted siphon (used to separate water insoluble chemicals having a specific gravity of less than 1). We carry a book on the oil spill containment trailer that shows every creek, stream and waterway within the county. Also, we maintain soil surveys and topographical maps that delineate all roads and drainage patterns.”
Maximum protection
“We have roll upon roll of duct tape for suiting up,” notes Stack. “Our chemical suits are completely bonded so vapors or drainage cannot enter, but we also tape over every seal to be absolutely certain team members have maximum protection. For patching and plugging we carry a lot of duct-seal compound because we use it all the time.
By far the most common type of incident for the team has been overturned tank trucks carrying a flammable liquid, usually gasoline. Surprisingly, the team has not yet had a serious fire at such an incident even though they have had as many as three separate gasoline trailers dump their loads in a single week.
In the three most recent incidents, the largest commodity loss has been 200 gallons, according to Stack. “Currently, we use a skirt around the dome lid cover that allows us to pump directly out of the truck while it is lying on its side. Before the dome skirt method became available, we used canvas drop tanks. We positioned a drop tank under the dome, allowed the product to flow into the drop tank, closed the dome lid cover with a homemade clamp, then pumped from the drop tank. We would repeat this operation until the product in the truck was below the level of the dome, then pump directly out of the truck tank.
“We are talking about simple tank truck rollovers where there has been no rupture,” cautioned Stack. “The tank truck is lying on its side, full of fuel, but there has been no major rupture and no fire.
“We don’t clean ’em up,” Stack said when asked what the team had learned from its seven years experience. “We contain it, then let the responsible party come in and clean it up.”
Controlling water volume
“We have learned from building a hundred or more inverted siphon dams to keep the volume of water backed upstream as low as possible, because the less water you back up, the less contaminated bank area you will have,” noted Stack. “Also, many industrial people use a lot of absorbent pads. We, on the other hand, use them very little. We refrain from using absorbent materials if at all possible because they take forever to pick up the product. We prefer to catch the product with the inverted siphon dams and skim it off with pumps. Our goal is to get it up as quickly and as safely as possible without playing with it for two weeks.”
“An essential component of response for us is the availability of expertise,” stressed Porter. “The most important thing we have working for us is the expertise we can call on within the community, from industry and the university—experts in pesticides, hydrocarbons, radiation. They report to the command post and work with us, or we will send a car or have the sheriffs department expedite their transport to the scene. We cannot overstate the crucial need for expert guidance.”
