Risky business

Every day, hazardous material is moved through the Flathead Valley. And every day, the hazmat team is ready to bat cleanup.

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

It doesn't roll into action often, but it's there, cached in the downtown Kalispell fire station and filled with a surprising amount of equipment for cleaning up hazardous materials.

Most people aren't aware of the big red "hazmat" trailer and the heavy-duty truck that hauls it, just as most people don't ponder the sheer volume of hazardous materials moving through the Flathead Valley. But the truck and the trailer are ready, every day, just as hazardous materials are out there, every day.

"We have a lot of hazardous materials going through the county on a daily basis, and a lot of it is going right through the cities," said Mark Peck, director of the Flathead County Office of Emergency Services.

The hazmat trailer represents a regional and statewide response program. The trailer has been provided by the state, but it has been augmented with equipment from the county and local jurisdictions, and most importantly, it is backed up a diverse array of people who make up the county's hazardous materials team.

That team includes personnel from law enforcement, professional and volunteer fire departments, the medical community, and even area industries and utilities.

It ranges from people who are trained to support a hazmat operation plus six hazmat technicians trained to wear protective suits and enter "hot zones."

One of those technicians, Kalispell firefighter Mike Chappuis, offers a tour of the hazmat trailer, showing off its capabilities. Inside are "bubble suits" with varying degrees of protection. There are laptop command computers, a device for refilling oxygen tanks, radio and satellite communications, and hand-held instruments for detecting basic hazardous gases.

There is a mobile bubble tent that is plumbed with showers and a water heater for technicians to be cleaned after leaving a hot zone. And an impressive computer device carries out one of the most basic duties in a hazardous material response - identifying the hazardous material.

A powdered, solid or liquid sample is put on a small plate below a sensor, and the computer, which contains a vast archive of hazardous and non-hazardous product chemistry, can discern what the substance is.

"If you put salt on there, it can tell you what brand," Chappuis said, later adding that if you put Coca-Cola on the plate, "it will tell you it's Coca-Cola."

The device was put to work last year when the hazmat team investigated a suspicious powder that was found in a mailbox in Bigfork.

The device identified the powder as a basic lawn fertilizer. Someday, however, it could identify something far more threatening.

The BNSF Railway runs some 40 trains through the northern tier of the Flathead every day, each train presumably loaded with a variety of products that could be considered hazardous, whether they be tankers filled with chemicals or freight cars loaded with car batteries.

The railroad doesn't discuss its manifests, or the volumes of hazardous materials that are transported through the area, but it does concede that rail traffic has been increasing steadily for years and likely will continue to grow.

And the railroad defends its safeguards and preparedness to manage accidents involving hazardous materials.

BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas said 40 trains move through the Flathead every 24 hours, each averaging 100 cars.

"BNSF railroad does handle hazardous materials, from paint thinners to chlorine, which is used to purify drinking water, as well as petroleum products," he said. "We take extra steps to ensure the safe movement of these necessary products in many ways."

Melonas said that last year on the railroad's 32,000-mile system, 99.99 percent of all hazardous materials arrived safely at their destinations. The railroad has not had a hazardous material fatality since 1981, when a conductor died after exposure to chlorine gas in a derailment near Vancouver, Wash.

Creston fire Chief Gary Mahugh recalls that when he was the county's hazmat team leader, rail traffic was a concern, but not the greatest concern.

That's because the railroad operates in a controlled, linear environment. "And they control that environment pretty doggone well," Mahugh said.

Melonas said the railroad's track record with hazardous materials is due to a wide range of factors: technology, such as derailment detectors and communications equipment, extensive training, not only for railroad employees, but joint training offered to area emergency responders, he said, citing a series of training sessions held in the Flathead Valley. The railroad has internal security, and it has its own hazardous materials response capabilities.

Derailments do occur, however. And one of the concerns about a train derailment in the Flathead is the potential environmental harm, Mahugh said.

BNSF rail lines hug long stretches of the Middle Fork Flathead River and main stem Flathead River, so a derailment carries risks of severe environmental consequences.

A greater concern for Mahugh and others are the trucks that carry hazardous chemicals right through downtown Kalispell, Whitefish and Columbia Falls.

"We have 140 trucks a day that go through the intersection of Main and Idaho," said county Commissioner Joe Brenneman, referring to a spot survey that was conducted several years ago. "I suspect half those trucks go right by our office."

Although local manufacturing facilities have hazardous materials on-site, fire departments are aware of those materials, Brenneman said. That's not the case with truck cargo.

That's just one reason why there is an ongoing need for basic and operational hazardous-material response training for the Flathead Valley's many volunteer firefighters who are often the first responders at the scene of an accident, says Brenneman, a longtime volunteer with the Creston Fire Department.

The necessary training, he explained, amounts to providing a responder with the basic diagnostic tools to know whether the scene of an accident may present hazardous materials threats.

Flathead County is prepared to respond to hazmat incidents, Peck says, but the county is in transition for the way its hazmat team will be led and managed. And the county's heavy reliance on volunteer responders is a system under stress, precisely because of the time-demands involved with being part of the county's hazmat response team.

Hazmat incidents are "low-frequency, high-intensity incident responses," Peck said, "and the only way to prepare for them is lots of training and lots of drills."

Peck estimates that those involved with the team put in 110 hours a year, just in training, which can be a heavy burden for volunteers.

Although Flathead County long has had a strong collective of volunteer emergency responders, Peck said, volunteerism in general is on the decline nationally.

More importantly, he said, volunteer involvement in the Flathead has not kept pace with the county's booming growth.

"A lot of the systems that worked well for us 10 or 15 years ago, they are under stress now," he said.

For that reason, there is an effort to seek grant funds that would provide some compensation for the county's volunteer hazmat responders, Peck said.

Another issue is leadership and day-to-day management of the team, which went into limbo when Peck's predecessor, Alan Marble, left the job two years ago.

Now there are discussions about the city of Kalispell taking a leadership role in the program. The city houses and maintains the hazmat truck, trailer and most equipment.

But Peck says the team must reflect the county's unusual demographics - most of the population lives outside the city limits of Kalispell, Whitefish and Columbia Falls.

Hazmat teams typically are centered with urban, professional fire departments in Montana's other cities, largely because the majority of the population lives inside the city limits of Billings and Missoula.

But Flathead County has maintained and will continue to have an interagency hazmat team out of necessity, Peck said.

"There's no single entity in the county that can fill the team," he said.

That situation presents unique challenges as well as strengths.

The challenges include managing "it out of multiple jurisdictions, multiple funding sources, and multiple personnel structures," Peck said. But the program's decentralized diversity is also its fundamental strength.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com