Tales from the Station

Part of the fire departments duties is to assist with calls that involve potentially hazardous material. We train for it and the fire service has been mandated to handle hazardous materials (HazMat) incidents. We are acutely aware of how lucky we are that we have a local Environmental Response Team (ERT) to handle HazMat problems. Just like we’re lucky to have a full time Ambulance Unit and we don’t have to run medical calls.

I was actually on a HazMat team before joining the fire department and I had an understanding of why the fire service is involved in HazMat. First reason, “If you call us, we will come”. If our tones go off there will be a convoy of vehicles with blue and red lights on it coming your way. Second, we have manpower, usually lots of manpower. Third we have gear. Not necessarily the right gear, but enough that we can protect ourselves if we’re smart about it.

Now, we’ve been aware that we have some hazardous materials stored in about twenty three locations predominantly along Rte. 37. Roughly, 2 million gallons worth at one time. We train for this and we have enough foam to cover the largest gas station completely with foam. This is called a blanket and we can maintain that blanket theoretically for the four to six hours it will take for the State to respond with a tanker full of foam.

We’ve responded mostly to help out the Tribes ERT. They show up with highly trained technicians, more gear than you can shake a stick at and all the authority and responsibility that goes with a HazMat response. I was wearing both hats at one incident where we showed up to a residential fuel spill. After shutting off the power and sizing up the incident the Fire Chief called in the HazMat team. He looked at me smiling and said “It’s all yours!” and everyone left while I waited for my other team.

We were at an incident one time and I was split between the fire department, who provided my insurance coverage after hours, and the HazMat team, that would only cover me during normal working hours. I looked and saw the HazMat supervisor talking with the Chief and they both looked at me at the same time and nodded. I thought to myself “Holy (censored)! They’re sending me on a suicide mission!” Next thing you know I’m in a moonsuit with a partner carrying acetone and some other nice stuff out of a storage building for disposal. Nice. You know the saying “Someone has to do it.”

Well, we get called to the most common HazMat incident of all. It involves a product everyone depends on and it drives our economy up or down and that is petroleum. We encounter is most at car accidents. We had one accident in which the entire oil pan emptied on the road and I had to switch from turnout gear to a moonsuit to help take care of the mess. I was dreading it because it was hot and a moonsuit traps everything including heat, sweat, natural gas, etc… and we were going to have to wipe everything up with pads. It was going to be a bit of work.

We got ready and went to take care of the mess when a State guy I never saw before said “It’s OK, open the road!” He was right and he was wrong at the same time. He was right that quantity spilled was below that required for a response, but he was wrong in that we were right there to clean it up and we could have in less than five minutes. What could we do, the highway technically belongs to them. So we grumbled back to our staging area to take off our gear complaining the whole time that we weren’t allowed to do a job we didn’t want to do in the first place.

Sometimes the calls aren’t that clear cut. HazMat sometimes means you don’t know what you’re dealing with when you get called out. We got called to a spill on Rte. 37 and we showed up along with the ERT. The call went something like this “You have an unknown substance on Rte. 37 at the Raquette Point Road intersection.” We showed up and lined both sides of the now shut down highway to see the spectacle. A substance was all over the road that had caused a couple of vehicles to skid out of control and was causing mayhem for the travelling public.

The highway department showed up after I inquired if they had been contacted. They’re just like the bridge corporation, the absolute last to know when something of theirs has been shut down. The highway department actually had a plan for something like this and they brought in sand and equipment to deal with it. It seemed far fetched until we realized that they deal with slippery stuff on the road for about half of the year. We took a truckload of pictures and then opened up the highway.

Upon further investigation by the police and the ERT it was determined to be used French fry grease. A used cooking oil recycler had been stopped down the road by the police after noticing his load was spilling out the back of the truck. We had the ERT in moonsuits, a full fire response and every badge carrying representative of law enforcement at this scene. It was full blown ridiculousness as we actually mopped the road with degreaser until the highway department took over with heavy equipment. Things like this keep us on our toes and provides a lot of stories to share at the station.