Hazard Handlers

A tanker carrying liquid nitrogen topples on the freeway. A crude oil pipeline springs a leak. Police stumble onto a smoking meth lab.

In a world brimming with potential chemical disasters, accidents happen. And when they do, hazardous materials crews get the call.

They operate away from the TV cameras and mostly below the public radar, but these masked men and women have quietly become a fixture of modern society, routinely called on to handle emergencies.

“Hazmat” teams are the front line of defense in the brave new chemical world. And with the specter of chemical and biological terrorism looming larger in the public psyche, their specialized abilities are more valued than ever.

“What [hazmat] is today--nobody thought or dreamed that is what we would be doing when we first started 20 years ago,” said Los Angeles City Fire Capt. Al Barnhart, a senior hazmat team member.

Today there are 14 hazmat teams in Los Angeles County alone, five in Orange County and numerous others in the rest of Southern California. Most of them consist of full-time firefighters who have received specialized training, and for whom hazmat duty is simply an added responsibility.

The Los Angeles City Fire Department operates three hazmat task forces, at Station 4 downtown, Station 39 in Van Nuys and Station 48 in San Pedro. Teams consist of 14 firefighters, each of whom has undergone at least 160 hours of hazmat training, making them certified hazmat “technicians.” Many are “specialists,” meaning they have had 240 hours of schooling. The Los Angeles County Fire Department operates three teams, in Rancho Dominguez, City of Industry and Santa Clarita.

Instruction is intense--trainees absorb a college semester’s worth of chemistry in just two weeks--and culminates in written and field exams.

“It’s really become more of a science,” said Mike Brady, chief of the hazardous materials section of the California Specialized Training Institute, the state’s certifying body. “There was a joke that hazmat team members were like plumbers in space suits. But now they’re utilizing complex databases and sophisticated monitoring equipment. They can take an unknown chemical and identify what that chemical is.”

Hazmat units have also attracted the attention of the federal government in recent years, particularly since the 1995 sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway, an act of chemical terrorism that left 12 dead and thousands injured. It quickly dawned on federal authorities that by the time U.S. military and emergency response personnel arrived on the scene of a similar attack in this country, they would serve little purpose.

“If something happens in Los Angeles, the city Fire Department, the county Fire Department [and neighboring departments] are all going to have to roll out the door and handle it. They can’t wait until somebody comes from Washington, D.C.,” said John M. Eversole, chairman of a National Fire Protection Assn. committee that sets national guidelines for hazmat competency. “Where the real life-saving is going to be done is in that first hour.”

As a result, the federal government, recognizing the importance of hazmat crews and other “first responders,” has steered resources to help train and equip local agencies. Under a Defense Department initiative in 120 major cities--later expanded to 156--specialists were dispatched to train local firefighters, paramedics and others in how to deal with chemical and biological agents.

Training for Terror

“We’re the guys that are going to be there first,” said Jim O’Connor of the city Fire Department’s hazmat team. “They’ll take at least 12 hours to get the NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] warfare people or the Marines to us. They’re not first responders. This is the first responder.”

Dealing with chemical and biological terrorism is now a staple of hazmat training, from recognizing the signs of a chemical or biological attack to such morbidly named tasks such as “mass casualty management.”

A countywide committee has been convened, and a full-time anti-terrorism coordinator has been appointed by the county Fire Department.

Fortunately, terrorist-attack readiness has never been put to the test. Or has it?

“Let’s just say we’ve had a number of things happen in the city that not too many people know about,” said Al Dawes, a veteran of the city’s hazmat crew. He declined to elaborate.

While terrorism has assumed a higher profile in recent years, hazmat teams continue to spend most of their time attending to more routine but still potentially catastrophic matters such as leaking trucks and abandoned drums of chemicals.

Each of the city’s three units operates a hazmat vehicle, or “squad,” which resembles an enclosed standard red fire engine. A dual-function vehicle that is also used to transport personnel to non-hazmat fires, the truck houses a small library of chemical reference materials, as well as a cell phone, a fax machine and a computer with access to chemical databases. Firefighters can also utilize modeling software that can project the size and direction of a plume of smoke.

When the chemical in question isn’t immediately identifiable, hazmat entry teams can radio whatever information they gather to personnel in the squad. There is little room for error. “First you have to know how to spell the thing,” Barnhart said. “One ‘ate’ or ‘ite’ can make a difference.”

Hazmat crews must also be familiar with an array of sophisticated monitoring equipment--including an infrared camera--that can be used to determine the radioactivity, corrosiveness and flammability of suspect chemicals.

Depending on what they’re up against, hazmat members may have to climb into level A protective suits, which are fully sealed ensembles. (Level B “splash” suits are hooded but don’t provide full body protection.) Made of butyl rubber on the inside and plastic-like Viton on the outside, level A outfits run about $4,000 apiece. A self-contained breathing apparatus provides up to an hour’s worth of air.

Suits Can Be Risky

Even using the requisite buddy system, getting completely dressed can take as long as 45 minutes. After a person is inside the suit, the humidity level doubles in five to seven minutes. Hand-eye coordination is severely impaired.

Manual dexterity? Try picking something up wearing three layers of gloves.

“Your ability to do your job drops 50% as soon as you get in that suit,” O’Connor said. “You have to be very tolerant of being in an enclosed environment that you cannot get yourself out of.”

Throw in the fatigue factor and an often acute loss of water weight, and the suit itself may pose a greater danger than the chemicals it’s supposed to protect against. As a result, time spent in the suit is tracked with a stopwatch, and hazmat members often tap out after 20 minutes.

“Sometimes you lose as much as four to five pounds in one entry,” Barnhart said. “It’s like learning how to crawl. You really can’t define the experience until you get in that suit. Your heart [rate] and blood pressure go up and you’re sweating like a pig. And you’re in an area where you know, ‘If I wasn’t in this suit, I’d be dead.’ You have to have a lot of confidence in your equipment.”

The painstaking hazmat process represents a major shift in gears for firefighters who are used to operating at one speed: Go. “You have to understand firefighters. When we see a fire, we go hard. We go strong. We want to get in there and knock it down,” O’Connor said. “Hazmat is a totally different animal. [It’s] a slow, methodical approach.”

Their job has been made smoother in recent years, thanks to public awareness and outreach programs that have cut down on illegal dumping, and state measures like the 1994 Unified Program, which pulled together a number of regulatory packages, resulting in more consistent management of California’s hazardous materials.

That program, for example, helped streamline the inventory process whereby agencies collect data on local businesses that handle hazardous materials. In case of an incident, that information can quickly be relayed to response teams via emergency dispatchers.

California, long considered a leader in hazardous materials management, is home to some of the country’s most stringent regulations. That, combined with a $9-million Y2K readiness effort carried out last year, has helped keep a lid on chemical disasters.

“In some cases, it might have even driven businesses out of California,” said Brady, of the Specialized Training Institute. “The bad side is, it hurts the economy. The good side is, we don’t have those hazardous materials around [because the businesses that stay] have looked at substituting something else.”

Concern about hazardous materials touches all types of government agencies, from health and environmental groups to the Los Angeles Police Department, which operates its own five-man hazardous materials unit focusing on the investigation of environmental crimes. But as the approach to hazardous materials becomes more uniform, those agencies are finally starting to click.

“Back in 1986-87, there was nothing. Everyone was doing their own thing,” Brady said. “We certify 18,000 people a year now. When they respond, they talk the same language.”

As for the fire personnel who already have their hands full fighting fires, hazmat duty might seem an unwelcome burden. Then again, these are the same people who double as everything from paramedics to helicopter pilots to swift-water rescuers.

“There are so many hats we wear as firefighters now. Years and years and years ago, you were a firefighter, you fought fires, and that was it. Today it’s not like that,” O’Connor said.

So why take on the added responsibility? The same reason he took up firefighting, O’Connor said: the challenge.

“People always put firemen up [on a pedestal]. Hey, we’re just regular people. It’s just another day at the office, as far as I’m concerned.”

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Danger on Board

When a hazardous materials crew arrives at a chemical spill, a key objective is to identify the substance in question. In the case of a highway or railway mishap, placards required by the federal Department of Transportation give crews an immediate idea of what they’re up against. All vehicles transporting hazardous materials, as well as the containers themselves, must be marked on all sides with placards like those below. The number at the bottom of each sign corresponds to a different class of hazard, of which there are nine.