Forum focuses on depot's preparedness

This story was published Tue, Apr 18, 2000

By Mary Hopkin
Herald Oregon bureau

If a chemical release were to occur at the Umatilla Chemical Depot, it's possible local residents wouldn't know until their eyes began to blur and their noses started to run.

Umatilla, Morrow and Benton counties are not completely prepared for a chemical spill, but federal, state and local emergency services are working on it.

About 40 local, state and federal officials participated in a Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program forum Monday to improve response time and readiness in the case of a chemical spill.

The forum, which continues today, was hosted by Madhu Beriwal, president of Innovative Emergency Management, a New Orleans company contracted by the Army to help devise an adequate emergency operations plan for the depot's neighboring counties.

Although Gov. John Kitzhaber has approved trial burns at the depot to begin Jan. 12, 2001, no chemical incineration can take place until an emergency plan is in place, said Wayne Thomas, chemical demilitarization program administrator for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

The depot, seven miles west of Hermiston, stores 220,604 munitions and containers filled with 7.4 million pounds of deadly nerve and mustard agents. The Army plans to begin burning the weapons in an incinerator in October 2001.

More than 1,100 types of accidents, from planes falling out of the sky to earthquakes, could cause a chemical release at the depot, Beriwal said. Her company studied each of the possible accidents as well as the regional weather patterns for four years to determine eight likely spill scenarios. Using that information, Beriwal and the emergency services participants have devised local warning, evacuation and protection plans since the group began meeting in December 1998.

But those plans are not effective enough, Beriwal said. In mock exercises last year, residents were not warned in time to evacuate, which could have resulted in deaths if it had been an actual release.

The group had hoped at least 90 percent of people in high-risk areas could be warned and evacuated before the chemicals reached them. But in the mock exercises, the plan failed in six of the eight scenarios. In the best-case scenario, it took nearly 35 minutes for the warning to get from the depot's emergency operations center to the general public.

The group spent nearly six hours trying to shave 15 minutes off that response time.

Tone-alert radios, which will be placed throughout the communities, are expected to cut the response time by about 10 minutes.

The group also considered having a county employee stationed at the depot around the clock to save the precious minutes it takes for the message to reach local law enforcement from the Army.

But Monday, the crowd of officials couldn't come to a consensus.

In fact, the group never had the opportunity to discuss the other agenda items, which included protection of those at risk, adequate medical services, response to information requests and protection of emergency workers.

They did agree such a large group wasn't the most efficient way to deal with fixing the emergency operations plan. So, delegates from each agency were nominated to tackle the plan, find solutions and bring the revised plan back to the group for approval.

Beriwal said she hopes to have the new plan in place by May, when it will be tested in another mock exercise.

 

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