Fire departments’ duties have changed dramatically since Robert Royall started at the Houston Fire Department on Nov. 26, 1973. Where the focus once was solely on firefighting, throughout the decades, the profession has evolved into an all-hazards occupation. In fact, instead of stomping out residential fires, Royal now oversees hazmat operations for the Harris County (Texas) Fire Marshal’s office — which protects one of the busiest petrochemical ports in the world on top of 4 million residents.

Royall’s hazmat career started early on when he was a member of the HFD’s Hazmat Response Team, one of the oldest in the nation that launched in 1978. Houston’s then-Fire Chief V.E. Rogers had seen a presentation about the Jacksonville (Fla.) Fire Department’s new hazmat team and thought that if anyone needed such resources, it was Houston, because the city was the petrochemical capital of the world. He then tasked District Chief Max H. McRae to organize the team and develop the program.

In 1981, Royall was promoted and given command of a Houston fire station that covered in its response area the industrial corridor of the Houston Ship Channel, part of the Port of Houston, where many energy and petrochemical companies are located. The department’s move foreshadowed events that would soon support the need for emergency hazmat teams, specifically, a 1984 toxic spill in Bhopal, India. There a pesticide plant leaked its contents and exposed hundreds of thousands of people to toxins. Estimates vary on the death toll. But a government affidavit in 2006 stated that the leak caused 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary partial and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.

“This incident brought to the forefront the need for an organized response to these specialized chemical events,” Royall said.

Then, right in his backyard, an explosion and fire occurred at the Phillips Petroleum Houston Chemical Complex in Pasadena, Texas, on Oct. 23, 1989, that resulted in 23 known dead and one missing. In addition, more than 100 people were injured and metal and concrete debris were found as far as six miles away following the explosion, the U.S. Fire Administration reported.

A New Threat

The Pasadena event was the first of several national events that led to public support for the mitigation and response to major hazmat incidents. And it wasn’t chemical spills alone, but a new threat of terrorism that further emphasized the need for a trained force. After the first attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1992, followed by the Oklahoma City Bombing and a sarin-gas attack at a Tokyo subway in 1995, it was clear that the fire service’s focus would be to respond to any chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) disasters, Royall said.

In 1994, Royall was promoted again by the HFD, this time to operations officer, the equivalent of a senior captain. Since that time, demands on the fire service for hazmat incident response have increased dramatically, he said.

“It is the single most demanding responsibility that has been put on the fire service since EMS,” Royall said.

Now, as hazmat chief for Harris County, Royall ensures that the marshal’s office can respond to CBRN events, especially in the Port of Houston that is home to 29 of the world’s largest energy producers. The in-house Emergency Operations Branch, also known as the hazmat group, is responsible for planning, mitigating and recovering from emergencies and disasters, whether natural, accidental or deliberate. The branch is staffed by hazmat technicians who support local fire and law enforcement when spills and releases occur, and perform safety inspections of facilities that store, sell or use such materials. The team can respond to day-to-day events, in addition to nefarious acts.

“They also assist in investigative efforts where hazardous materials and WMDs are involved,” Royall said.

The team consists of 30 personnel, both full-time and part-time — in addition to fire inspectors and investigators who are cross-trained and can be leveraged as the force multiplies. Its annual operating budget is about $2.2 million.

Several pieces of equipment are used to respond to events, including a mobile hazmat response command post, dubbed Hazmat 1. It holds the advanced detection and identification technologies, Level A chemical response protective clothing and an encrypted communications system. As a complement, the marshal’s office also has Hazmat 2, a tender used to deliver foam to industrial chemical incidents. They also have a hazmat response boat because they are located in upper Galveston Bay, Royall said.

While Royall is more than proud of Harris County’s capabilities, it is only one of the many hats he and his personnel are asked to wear. For example, the office also operates the Harris County Fire Training Academy and conducts fire investigations, such as arson.

“I am in a unique situation because I have arson plus WMD response technicians and I am able to use the law enforcement part of my command for environmental crime issues,” he said. “We are able to do a lot of things within one agency.”

Training Options

Although his office oversees Harris County’s training academy, Royall isn’t responsible for hazmat training. Instead, federal funding supports CBRN training for U.S. first responders, including hazmat technician certifications, said Lauren Bourg, the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training’s (NCBRT) coordinator of outreach. The organization, housed on Louisiana State University’s campus in Baton Rouge, is part of the DHS National Training Program Cooperative and receives $23 million in grant funding every year from Congress.
“The training is free to all first responders with the help of those federal grants,” Bourg said.

NCBRT has more than 200 instructors located across the country who are either active or retired first responders. Training materials are shipped from a warehouse on LSU’s campus to the participating department’s location, Bourg said.

According to Bourg, the NCBRT provides a crucial service to departments that need to provide hazmat training but don’t have the resources to provide it themselves or send personnel to training centers, due to the budget cuts that are occurring from coast to coast. “This is federally funded, so we are trying to get this training to you and it doesn’t cost you anything,” she said.

Training is available to fire and police, hazmat and tactical commanders, as well as nurses and medical professionals who help victims of an incident. It also is offered to university-based personnel who may need to address mass-shooting incidents on campus as well as those dealing with a new threat: agri-terrorism, which addresses attacks on the food-supply chain, from farmers, to wholesalers to grocers.

The NCBRT’s hazmat technician training covers the following: awareness and response to biological events; preparing communities; prevention, transit and transportation; integrated response with WMD incidents and biological incidents; and management of emergency operations. It also focuses on containment and testing of hazmat materials; computer-aided management of operations; and tactical operations for hazmat technicians. A majority of courses include one day of classroom training, followed by a field scenario day where trainees work with hazardous materials, with a focus on their assessment and transportation, Bourg said.

One such training field is led by Bruce Chisholm, the curriculum delivery manager for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Center for Radiological/Nuclear Training (CTOS) at the Nevada National Security Center. The training center, which was founded in 1998 and is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), simulates real-life scenarios to teach state and local emergency responders how to execute a well-coordinated and fully integrated WMD response, as well as strategies to mitigate such threats.

According to Chisholm, instructors specifically focus on radiological and nuclear training for first responders, which is offered free to state, local and tribal departments. The center also pays for attendees’ travel expenses, he said, adding that CTOS’ 32-hour hazmat technician course is split 50/50 between classroom and field training. The facility trains about 100 students per class, with classes offered about 22 times a year.

The facility wasn’t always used to train the nation’s first responders for hazmat events, but the terrorist attacks that occurred on U.S. soil began to change the focus. Indeed, once it became clear that the Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by a homegrown terrorist, it was clear that the fire service’s focus would have to change dramatically to address such threats in the future.

Then it All Changed

Then, when the commercial jets hit New York City’s Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, Congress took notice and started to debate ways to fund hazmat and CBRN training. It was that event that really pushed the issue into the forefront, Chisholm said.

“After 9/11, funding resources increased with the recognition that terrorism was out there and the CBRN threats needed to be addressed and trained on,” he said.

Public-safety personnel sent to the Nevada site first are taught to dispel radiation myths and misconceptions. Chisholm said one misconception is that radiation exposure changes a person’s biological makeup.

“They think radiation will turn them into the Hulk or Spider-Man,” he said.

Instead, first responders are taught not to fear radiation.

“Radiation is not something to be feared but something you can actually deal with,” Chisholm said. “As a matter of fact, my own personal opinion is that I would rather deal with radiation than nuclear or biological any day of the week, because I have the instrumentation that can protect me as long as I know how to use them.”

Chisholm said that addressing radiological incidents, such as a dirty bomb, and the protection of first responders involves three strategies. Specifically, radiation protection is based on time, distance and shielding to exposure. For example, less time in the field reduces exposure. In addition, the further an individual is from the source the less radiation exposure suffered. Finally, shielding personnel behind a tanker full of water will offer additional protection, as will hiding in buildings with concrete walls and behind automobiles.

“Anything between you and the radioactive source means less exposure,” he said. “If you are responding to a dirty bomb … you have to understand those basic concepts.”

After basic concepts are covered in the classroom, attendees hit the field. They first learn how to use equipment, such as radiation detectors that use a Geiger-Müller tube — the sensing element of a Geiger counter instrument that can detect a single particle of ionizing radiation. Chisholm said that students are shown how to use them, how to interpret the data, how to protect themselves and how radiation exposure may affect victims’ health.

“We teach them how to detect alpha, beta and gamma radiation and how each affects their body,” he said. “We also teach them the why behind the need to wear proper PPE and the consequences if they do not.”

After the classroom and equipment instruction, a final exercise is conducted onsite at CTOS’ T1 facility. Chisholm explained that the T1 site is where the U.S. military held several nuclear atmospheric tests in the 1950s. For one test, military scientists detonated a nuclear bomb that had been placed atop a 500-foot tower. Radiological materials like caesium-137 were released into the air and also seeped into the earth.

In fact, 60 years later, much of the caesium that settled into the ground still can be detected, Chisholm said.

“So when we go out to T1, we actually have a higher background radiation level that supports the instrument training each student [receives], as though something had happened there recently,” he said. “No one can get contaminated or over exposed. It just gives that extra benefit of realism when you are out at that test site and performing that training.”

Fire chiefs must make CBRN training a priority in 2012, if they haven’t already added it to the top of their to-do list. In fact, complacency when it comes to the CBRN threat is a fear of Chisholm’s. He has the inside scoop about current events that “can’t be reported in the media” and feels that training is essential because, although the media hasn’t covered major nuclear or radiological threats via terrorist attacks, they still exist and pose a major threat to U.S. cities.

“Fire chiefs, especially the ones in major metropolitan areas, need to take the dirty bomb threat as being a real threat,” he said.

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