Armed with heavy gear, stuffed toys and high-tech equipment, firefighters drilled together in Renton Friday in simulations of hazardous-materials spills.
They were joined by a U.S. Army unit, the Civil Support Team, based at Camp Murray in Tacoma. That unit is on the frontlines of responding to a weapon of mass destruction in the region.
The military unit arrived in 10 vehicles, representing about 80 percent of the team.
It was hot day for the rotating drills at the county’s sewage-treatment facility in south Renton, especially inside protective clothing.
Just how hot was it inside that gear? Probably not as hot as it looked, answered Renton firefighter Ryan Simonds.
“As long as you are on air, it’s nice,” he said.
Once inside their gear, they left the outside environment behind. Their voices, when audible, sounded almost other-worldly.
Just as a reminder, they were told to keep hydrated and take breaks. Before and after a drill, their vital signs were taken.
In all about 50 firefighters from 14 fire agencies in South King County and the Eastside participated in the drill Friday. The drills were conducted earlier in the week, too.
The agencies train together quarterly, but this is the first time they’ve done so at the treatment plant. They’ve been invited back.
The plant, spread out over 90 acres, has three buildings close together that are no longer used that provided realistic locations for different types of emergencies requiring different gear.
The response staging is done carefully to ensure the safety of the fire crews. In a real-life situation, what gear they wear inside isn’t chosen unit the chemical threat is determined. Since this was a simulation, no chemicals were used, other than small amounts for testing purposes.
Chlorine, which is bleach, was the threat on Friday.
In its gaseous form, chlorine is unstable and unsafe, especially if it leaks. That’s why the treatment plant switched to liquid chlorine about 10 years in the final treatment of wastewater.
The City of Renton was concerned about what assistant plant manager Don Wickens called some “pretty nasty stuff.”
The county stores about 90,000 gallons of the liquid form at the plant.
A drawing was posted on one the buildings used in the simulation to show how far a major leak then would have gone, covering most of downtown Renton.
The county is changing over to a liquid chlorine at its West Point treatment plant now.
That gaseous chlorine was off-loaded in a self-contained building used in Friday’s exercise.
Firefighters in protective gear and monitoring devices searched the building, including under the old tracks, for survivors. One carried a pink stuffed toy as if to entice out a child.
They found a “survivor,” fashioned from old fire hose shaped into a human with wood for a head. They brought the survivor to the waiting decontamination, something akin to a human car wash, where it was thoroughly washed, then checked for contamination.
More washing was done before the “survivor” was popped out the other side of the yellow containment tent.
Next door, crews went inside to fix a broken pipe leaking chlorine, simulated with white smoke. It was like working in the dark until the smoke slowly cleared.
And next to that glass-fronted building was a more-open one where chlorine and other chemicals were stored until it was mothballed. Holes were drilled in pipes to help simulate a leak.
The goal was to plug the end of a broken pipe to stop a liquid spill and secure the stopper with tape. The water on the floor bubbled, thanks to some dishwasher soap from Costco.
Such drills offer emergency crews from across the region to train together, becoming more familiar with each other when they have to work together in a real-life situation.
Such training for a large-scale event improves communication; the teams that participated in each drill were made up of different agencies.
“No one agency can handle a single large event,” said Tukwila Battalion Chief Martin Grisham, who acted as the public information officer for the simulation.
