Never a dull moment

So here I was minding my own business getting ready for an afternoon emergency drill but just trying to take it easy (a.k.a chillen). We get an emergency informational alert message that a power station near to us has had an acid leak. Ok, nothing for us to do but help keep people away since as a non-air born leak nothing to really panic about. Fire department shows up with their massive HazMat truck and supplies, but again this is all still routine. Come on you guessed it Until….

Well apparently the acid is 98% pure Sulfuric Acid which is of course very dangerous but what was even more dangerous was it was literally spurting within inches of a 5000 gallon tank of some very explosive noxious chemical. If this acid would spray onto the tank, it would eat through it in short order and then, well Ka-Boom! Now this would not be a small Ka-Boom, this would have been explosion with well simply bad gas (worse than most men at the completion of Superbowl Sunday). Without prompting the Fire Department asks if we still have that specialized emergency vehicle with the remote camera that we can position in to get some bird’s eye views? Of course we do. So here’s Matthew driving straight into the middle of the scene, firing up all his equipment and getting that camera in nice and close. Turn around and there is the Battalion Chief, Safety Officer, and roughly 6 other firefighters looking over my shoulder trying to figure out if we should close off a couple of city blocks or how we can stop this. I figure I am going to stay close to these guys.

Good news was as the pressure went down on the Sulfuric Acid pipe it got farther and farther from the combustible tank, so we were safe. Did I mention it was raining the whole time? You really wonder how many incidents happen like this close to us, and we never know anything about them. Wonder how many times medics, or figh fighters, or cops do something that we never know about that preventively saved lives. As the British would say, "Good show, Good show". So all was right in the world. We monitored the situation as a safety precaution for the Fire Department allowing their Batallion Chief to look over the shoulder of the HazMat crew without actually getting into the "Hot Zone".

But what a way to start the day and get your blood pumping. The cool thing was technology is just as important as bravery and manpower. I will put up a couple of pictures on my blog for those who are interested.

Then to top it off we had our Mass Casualty drill later in the day. By the end of the day I was just wiped, absolutely wiped. But today is Friday and I have a whole weekend to recover! Yea!