Eleven people died after a chemical tank holding hundreds of thousands of corrosive chemicals ruptured last Tuesday at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. in Longview. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board is leading the investigation as questions mount over workplace safety and the caustic stew of chemicals and equipment maintenance within the paper mill.
Washington state’s deadliest workplace incident in nearly a century has raised concerns about Oregon’s level of readiness and resources to respond to hazardous materials incidents.
That experience dates back to 1989, when Oregon became the first state in the nation to establish a state-level hazmat program. Today, there are 12 regional hazardous material emergency response teams, from Astoria to Ontario, who can quickly deploy to support local first responders in emergencies, as well as offer training to local agencies and industries. The Community Right to Know program allows members of the public to see where hazardous substances are being stored in their communities, unless that information is determined to be sensitive or confidential.
Oregon State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple joins us to share her thoughts on the Longview disaster and Oregon’s efforts to mitigate the risks hazardous materials pose.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Eleven people have died after a chemical tank holding hundreds of thousands of corrosive chemicals ruptured last Tuesday at a paper mill in Longview. It was Washington’s deadliest workplace incident in nearly a century.The U.S. Chemical Safety Board is leading the investigation as questions mount over workplace safety at the facility. The disaster has also raised questions about Oregon’s ability to respond to incidents involving hazardous materials. The Oregon State Fire Marshal, an independent agency, oversees twelve regional hazmat teams. Mariana Ruiz-Temple leads the agency, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Mariana Ruiz-Temple: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Miller: What went through your mind when you heard about the disaster in Longview?
Ruiz-Temple: I think, like most people, it was just devastating to see, and like you mentioned, this is not only Washington but the Northwest’s most devastating hazardous materials incident and our hearts and prayers go out to not only the community, the emergency responders, but certainly the victims and their families. And I think from a human standpoint that was my first reaction like many of us that watched it unfold on TV.
And then in terms of my professional side, knowing the kinds of exposures, the kinds of chemicals we see in those facilities and the kind of response that’s necessary to protect not only the victims but the people in the surrounding areas, it just quickly goes to the things that people may not see. The extra level of training, the extra level of capacity and preparation and planning for these kinds of facilities that are in and around a lot of our communities in the United States and around the world, frankly.
Miller: Well, can you give us a sense for the challenges of an emergency response in an industrial facility like this one, like the Nippon Dynawave plant?
Ruiz-Temple: You know, many of these plants are necessary for the kinds of products that we all use every day, not only these kinds of plants, but many different types of industrial or manufacturing plants. They exist around many of our communities, and the kinds of things that are in the facility that are stored within the facility, all necessitate not only strong and swift planning and action from the company, but also the responders.
In Oregon we have a state hazmat response team program, you mentioned it earlier. We have twelve hazmat teams around the state and their number one priority is to be trained, equipped, and prepared to respond to these types of chemical incidents that we have. The Longview incident highlighted a significant incident, but every day we have other incidents that may not be as similar but happen every day.
For example, last week we had an anhydrous ammonia leak in Portland and Gresham where we responded. We’re seeing, down in Orange County, a significant hazmat incident that occurred in the last couple of weeks down there. So I think having the right personnel – like I said, trained and equipped and prepared – are necessary for these types of incidents that don’t happen every day but do happen, and when they happen, you need the right tool. And in Oregon we have those tools within our response system that we have in Oregon.
Miller: I do want to hear more about the Oregon plans and preparation level, but just to stick with Longview for a second, has Oregon had any role in the cleanup and recovery there?
Ruiz-Temple: Early on when the incident first occurred, our state Hazmat 7, which is Portland Fire, did receive a call initially for the possibility of a mutual aid response. So helping that Vancouver had materials in the team that responded. During that call it was determined that they did not need mutual aid, but they did help out in terms of resource identification, the hazards with that type of chemical exposure information, so what we would call resource information, a consult.
What did quickly happen, however, is we do know that victims were transported to two different hospitals, one of those being Legacy Emanuel Hospital. And our Hazmat Team 7 did respond, and we did provide decon. As you can imagine with this type of chemical, in order to get victims the best and quickest life safety measures, you have to decon victims. And so those hazardous materials technicians did decon those patients before they were able to receive that life saving…
Miller: Decon meaning decontaminate, get the hazardous chemicals off of their skin or clothing?
Ruiz-Temple: Yes, apologies. Yes, “decon” is decontaminating them. In this case, a significant amount of water, upwards of thirty minutes for each patient before they were able to be treated.
Miller: Could what happened in Longview last week happen in Oregon?
Ruiz-Temple: Yeah, great question. I think that’s a question that many of us ask when we hear. I think the answer is yes. We have the potential, given the right circumstances, and we’re still watching to see how things are unfolding in the investigation in Longview and learn those lessons, but we do have chemicals and we do have facilities like that in Oregon. And so having the right training and planning in advance and having the community part of that planning and training, but also the knowledge of what chemicals are in your community are important.
So we know that they exist here, and we have facilities such like that we’ve seen at Nippon, but also others. So the answer is yes, and that’s why we want to do our very level best to be prepared for hazardous material incidents in Oregon.
Miller: Why did Oregon start the nation’s first state level hazmat program back in 1989?
Ruiz-Temple: It’s a lot of what we talked about early on when the legislation was created, but around the 1970s, you start to see pretty significant hazmat incidents occurring in communities. We saw Love Canal in ‘77, which was a community being built on a landfill that began to have significant impacts to the people living there. We saw Three Mile Island, which was a partial nuclear reactor to one of the reactors. So we started to see that on our soil in Oregon.
In the ‘70s, you started to see the Environmental Protection Agency stood up, and then in 1984, the world’s worst hazmat incident occurred in Bhopal, India, which about 20 to 30 thousand individuals were impacted with methyl isocyanide, which was the release of a chemical around their community, and you start to see the nation talk about what are we doing to prepare and plan.
So there was no significant incident in Oregon, but Oregon led the way not only in creating the first Community Right to Know program in ’85, which was a year before the feds, but creating the first state hazmat team in ’89 program. And so Oregon really was the tip of the spear, saying we’re going to do what we need to do for planning, Community Right to Know, and response. So having a program 35 to 40 years, depending on the program, in the making, has really set us up to be prepared, as much as we can in this space.
Miller: What role does the state play now, in response to hazardous materials, emergencies, catastrophes, compared to local agencies, say, Portland Fire Bureau? Or Eugene? Or a local fire district?
Ruiz-Temple: In terms of planning, under what we call the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act, at the federal level there was an element of that law that required each state to create a State Emergency Response Commission, and that’s called the SERC. In addition, that piece of legislation required each state to create local emergency planning committees. And so you take those two programs, you take the efforts happening at local emergency management, state management, those are the places where communities and those that are part of those programs plan, train, exercise, and be prepared for chemical emergencies.
When you go to response, in terms of, you mentioned Portland and Eugene, those happen to be two of our twelve state hazmat teams. But every fire department in Oregon has a certain level of capability and response, and many times they can manage a hazardous materials incident depending on how big and depending on the chemical. But once it exceeds their capacity and capability, then they call in a State Fire Marshal incident or a hazmat team. So having coverage around the entire state of Oregon that you can call and have a team come in is important so that we don’t have gaps in our response system.
And let’s say if it’s in rural Oregon or a smaller department that doesn’t have those capabilities, and we equip them, we plan and train and exercise for them to be ready. And in the state of Oregon, there is no gap in terms of a response team, but where we know some of these chemical plants are, you start to see larger departments that have even more level of training than maybe just an average hazardous materials kind of training, baseline trade training.
Miller: But how do they know that? I mean, you mentioned Three Mile Island, there it’s pretty obvious. Everybody around there knows this is a nuclear power plant. Fukushima would be the same thing, but if you’re a firefighter in Eugene or in Portland or anywhere, how do you know that some particular place that’s now on fire or has had some kind of serious industrial accident, that that is also a place where there are potentially very hazardous materials?
Ruiz-Temple: In Oregon, we have the Oregon Community Right to Know Act, and that law requires facilities and companies that store hazardous materials to report to our agency those materials. We have a validation process, and in addition to that, we provide that information to community members that might want to see those chemicals.
But it’s also provided to each local emergency planning committee, emergency management agency, and every fire department. And they use that to preplan for those chemicals in their communities, but also during response, when they receive that 911 call, they have that information at their fingertips so they know the kind of exposures and they know the right type of response, and that helps protect them in advance of a fire, but also during an actual response or chemical emergency.
Miller: You mentioned that the public has access to this, too. I tried. I didn’t actually fully register myself, but I went to the website where you have to register to get an account to access the information, and to be perfectly honest, I think I have an average technical ability for website navigation, and this was not easy. It didn’t seem like the most user-friendly method to get this information. But why do I need to register anyway? If the point is public access, why isn’t this just readily available?
Ruiz-Temple: If you were to go to the OSFM’s website, towards the bottom there’s a “Community Right to Know” link, and when you click on that, to your point, we ask you to register so that we can validate bad actors, or where you live and you’re from. And once you receive approval, then you have the ability to go in and look up a particular address or look up a particular facility. There are some chemicals that are extremely hazardous chemicals or chemicals like etiological disease-causing agent chemicals, radioactive, those kinds that are an extra layer before individuals receive.
So if folks want to go to our website, they can scroll down, go to “Community Right to Know.” There is a form that you referred to, and what we want to make sure is that the people that are using it are using it appropriately, that they’re using it safely. And then we do have a hotline if folks need a different level of training or to your point, if you want additional information where we’d be happy to walk folks through that as well.
Miller: So just to be clear, the reason for asking everybody to register is to prevent terrorists from getting access to dangerous materials?
Ruiz-Temple: You know, early on in the early 2000s, there was a pretty significant response to all this chemical information just being available to folks. And so what we did is worked with different partners at that time, and we just don’t want folks that may want to know, for example, where all the chlorine is or where all these bad chemicals lead to have them at their fingertips. We want to be able to show that we’re doing a certain level of security, but then also meeting that balance where communities and individuals want to know the types of chemicals.
That’s why we’re doing these efforts to make sure that we’re tracking that kind of information. But certainly to your point, we want Oregonians to know the kinds of chemicals that are in their communities, and we want to be able to provide an extra layer of training or information through our hotline if folks need that information.
Miller: Last week we had a conversation about freight train traffic, and we got a voicemail from somebody who works in industrial Northwest Portland and who was concerned about hazardous materials and derailments in particular.They mentioned a pretty serious derailment in Ohio a couple of years ago. How much does your agency prepare for disasters like that?
Ruiz-Temple: We know that hazardous materials are flowing through our communities on the road, on rail. We know we have fixed facilities like we saw in Nippon. So our hazardous materials teams plan, train, exercise for anything that is coming through your community. And earlier in the decade we also had the crude oil response program.
So we do have personnel that are laser focused on crude oil and other hazardous materials on rail, and their job is to conduct those exercises. So we work with the local community, our responders, and our hazmat teams to make sure that we also can report or respond also to those kinds of incidents.
A lot of those impact our waterways. A lot of them can impact communities, and so we have the right kind of equipment and training for those as well. A lot of that you saw come out of those pretty significant crude oil incidents that occurred in the early 2000s as you saw the uptick of crude oil being transported through communities.
Miller: Does any particular hazmat disaster keep you up at night right now?
Ruiz-Temple: I think all of them keep me up at night. I worry that do we have the right amount of people that want to do these jobs? Are people that work as safety officers within their own commercial manufacturing companies, are they paying the right attention? I think when you look at a hazmat incident, it is a whole ecosystem where you are wanting the community to be prepared, and we do that through planning, training, and exercise, but also are the facility owners and operators doing their part? And they also play a part. And then do we as a response system have a response system that’s ready?
When you see incidents like the significant incidents we’ve seen on the West Coast in the last month, those larger types of incidents keep me up at night. I’m thankful for the programs that Oregon implemented over 40 years ago, but not any one of them is foolproof, and so we want to continue to make sure that people have the information, and certainly our responders have that information, so they know those life decisions that need to happen in just seconds, frankly.
Miller: Mariana Ruiz-Temple, thanks very much.
Ruiz-Temple: Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
Miller: Mariana Ruiz-Temple is Oregon State Fire Marshal.
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