Starting Early, Ending Late

Today was a very long day. After going on several calls through out the night keeping my sleep to a minimum I was tired but we were moving into the final classroom day of the HazMat tech class. It started out with me being appointed to an Incident Commander role. I had an eighteen wheeler crashing by the Grange in Pullman on the railroad tracks spilling gas with the driver injured. It is always hard to remember everything you can and should do when you are thrown on the spot. But I guess that is what it would be like in a normal situation. You do not get a ton of time to have all your plans before rolling out the door on a call.

Thankfully we were not in the class the whole time. Part of the day was spent putting people in the Class A HazMat suits so they could get use to it and do some work in it to understand what it is like in the suits.

Getting someone in the suit is a long process. It starts with putting on SCBA, SCBA mask, and a pair of latex exam gloves. Then comes the suit itself. A Class A suit is fully-encapsulated. That means that there are no opening except for the zipper. The zipper is very special and forms a vapor barrier to protect the person inside from fumes, liquids, and solids. The person puts in their feet into the booties and the suit is pulled up to the waist of the person. Then a pair of boots are put on over the booties.

The person who wears the suit is usually dressed by one or two helpers. Once the lower part of the body is in the suit, then we work on getting the arms and hands in the suit. The suit has a pair of gloves attached to the suit. The hands are worked into the gloves, so now the wearer has two pair of gloves on. A final pair of outer gloves are put on, making it so there are three pair of gloves on. This makes it very hard to feel anything or grab anything that is small. A hard hat is put on. There is a towel taped to the front of the hardhat. That is used to wipe the inside of the suit where there is a clear plastic that the wearer looks out. It usually gets fogged up. So the wearer needs to constantly wipe it clear. The hardhat is taped to the SCBA mask to keep it from falling off.

The person in the suit then sits on a seat until he is ready to actually make entry. Once that time comes then the helpers puts the person on air and zips the suit shut. The person is now ready to go into the Hot Zone.

The Final Steps of Going On Air

After leaving the Hot Zone he needs to go through Decon. That is a process where the person’s suit is washed in couple different steps. Once he is washed on the outside, then someone will help him take the Class A suit off in the reserve order it was put on.

Normally in a decon situation the people doing the decon are also wearing a HazMat suit, but for drills we do not put those in decon into a suit. Decon can be a couple steps like in the picture I have below, and in some cases can be many steps. It all depends on what we need chemicals are being worked with.

Decon

There is one other thing that those in the fire department joke about, it is the blue canaries. In the old days of mining, miners would bring a canary with them. If the canary died while in the mine, the miners knew there were some bad gases in the mine and they would evacuate. A blue canary is a police officer who has gotten himself too close to the scene and “dies”. The joke is that the Hot Zone starts where the first blue canary is found.

A deputy demonstrates usage of the Blue Canary system

Once our group was done with this drill we went to lunch and the second half of the day was spent doing the classroom work. I was so tired I was having a hard time staying awake at some points.

We got out of class around five o’clock pm. I went to the office and got a nap before I had to go to Smith Gym for dodgeball. We lost all four games again, but we lasted about twice as long.

Rich in jail, Ben making his way there

After dodgeball I went to Colfax. I was watching some news before I was going to go to bed. That is when I heard on my scanner a call for CPR in progress. I waited for a while to see what was going to happen. I was thinking I may be called out on it. Sure enough about an hour after the call, I got a phone call from Pete asking if I could go to do the investigation.

I drove to Uniontown and did the investigation. By the time I was done it was past three in the morning. I decided to go to Pullman and sleep there rather than going all the way to Colfax. That would give me four hours of sleep rather than three hours that I would get if I went to Colfax.