Radioactive? No. But There’s No Doubt This Material Was Hazardous to Your Health : A Job So Dirty, Hazmat Had to Do It

No one needed to ask, “Where’s the beef?”

After mounds of it were found rotting in a freezer at Peralta Canyon Park, a hazardous-materials disposal crew Thursday performed a delicate clean-up that at times looked like an emergency response to a radioactive spill.

Kryptonite-green and bacteria-ridden, the meat became biohazardous after sitting at room temperature for up to five months in a broken freezer.

Christine Cook made the nostril-fluttering discovery last Sunday.

As head of the concession stand for a girls’ softball league that plays at the park, Cook opened the freezer, which she believed to be empty.

In fact, to her shock and dismay, it contained pounds and pounds of fetid chicken, rancid hamburgers and frankfurters that may have last been frozen before O.J. Simpson was freed.

The food was bought by a Pop Warner football league that also uses the park.

“I got out of there,” Cook said.

Cook’s first call was to the president of the softball league, who called Pop Warner officials, who called the Anaheim Fire Department, which sent in members of the Hazardous Materials Response Team, known as Hazmat.

The team donned oversized space suits and special breathing devices reserved for only the most dangerous messes.

“It’s good to know there are people out there that can handle this,” said Cook, standing off to one side as workers sealed the meat-from-hell in a large, plastic drum.

The drum was then trucked to a Los Angeles rendering plant, and Hazmat specialists sprayed the freezer and concession stand with a bleach-and-water mixture to kill the bacteria.

All in a day’s work for the intrepid emergency technicians, who seldom get due credit for the difficult duty they perform every day.

“They’re kind of unsung heroes,” says Bob Hirst, operations chief for the Anaheim Fire Department. “[They] end up with the unpopular jobs no one else wants to take on.”

From age-old diapers to glowing garbage cans, the world is generating more and more refuse that must be “handled with care,” experts said Thursday.

Hazmat specialists have become the real toxic avengers, delivering whole neighborhoods from life-threatening spills or appetite-killing odors.

“I’ve told my wife some pretty gruesome stories,” says one front-lines worker in Santa Ana.

“We go to school for a month, full-time, 160 hours,” says Capt. John Jason of the Santa Ana Hazardous Materials Team, one of several separate units that handle the hundreds of hazardous materials Orange County sees each year. “Our normal hazardous materials call lasts two hours. We could have a 55-gallon drum, not labeled. It could be radioactive material, or water. We have to handle it as if it could be the most dangerous thing on earth.”

Jason says the case of the moldy meat is not only common, but hardly the worst call a Hazmat team will face.

“It’s what doesn’t smell,” he says, “that will kill you.”

“We get involved with medical waste,” says Jack Miller, a program manager for the Orange County Health Agency, which oversees the several Hazmat teams. “We get involved with asbestos, drug labs, fuel spills in different locations throughout the county. We’ll occasionally get a discharge of cleaning solutions, or dyes.”

Odorless hazards, including any number of carcinogens, can be waiting around the next corner for Hazmat specialists, who carry extensive libraries along with their suits and gas masks.

“Our fire truck is a bookmobile,” Jason says. “It’s a library on wheels.”

From farm chemical manuals to thick textbooks, the Hazmat specialists often refer to up-to-date literature, trying to figure out what two substances, mixed together, might do.

“What the normal homeowner has,” Jason says, “is enough to blow your roof off your house.

“We had a homeowner who used sulfuric acid to clean his drain, and when that didn’t work, he poured Drano down there . . . An acid cloud took over the house.”