During the week of hell.. aka switch over to Spillman.. On Tuesday as I was on my way home from work before I could even make it to the county line there was a tanker rollover in Brigham. I heard them talking about wanting to page Willard to assist so I called my mom to see if she could get Kennedy from the bus stop. She could so I headed to the station and got there just as they paged us. My job was to take the brush truck and HazMat trailer out. We also took an engine.
This is the tanker when we got on scene. It was full of propane.
Brigham asked us to run a 5 inch line down to where it was at and set up a water monitor to spray onto the tank. Propane is already a cold gas when it comes out and is heavier than air. So when it reacts with water it freezes. We did what they asked and WE staged about 900 feet away from the tanker. We ran our line down there and set up an unmanned monitor so we were safely out of the way. There is nothing you can do in a situation like this besides keep the area evacuated, keep yourself and your apparatus a safe distance away in case it bleves and wait for the company to come offload the tanker.
Our unmanned monitor they requested and then they had a manned line on the left side of the pic
We went over some safety scenarios.. if it blew how we would evacuate.. discussed some worst case scenarios for a fire etc and how we would handle it in this situation and set up an evacuation route just for fun.
Our apparatuses
They always joke in HazMat class they way to handle a spill is #1 rule of thumb- be far enough away from the chemicals that your thumb covers the scene and #2 break out the lawn chairs until the clean up companies arrive. Thats pretty much what we did. We stayed out of the hot zone and broke out our chairs we keep in the HazMat trailer. We were on scene for about 3 hours so ......
This is how you command.. one radio for Willards VHF channel, one radio on Fire 1 and one radio on Brighams 800 channel they run on.
and after all that fun and adventure it was time to start gathering up 900 ft of 5 inch hose.. my favorite NOT!
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