> While the all-male crew were relaxed and casual in their speech most of the time, they would become very serious if anyone cracked a joke or something about any of the safety issues.

That was my experience as well, not just with the crew, but with the experienced jumpers who were on the same plane. On the ground, they seemed pretty goofy, but when we got on the plane they started to focus up and at release altitude, they were very concentrated on the mission at hand and they were bonding as a group to perform the maneuvers they had carefully planned on the ground. I would love to see similar gearing up for hazardous work in laboratory settings.

>Thus, I was using the same words to comment on the owner's proud proclamation of their “ethics” in not stopping to determine the cause of the accident but to instead deliberately continue operations with the cause unknown.

One of the things that still continues to surprise me after 10 years of collecting hazmat headlines is how quickly some emergency responders are to declare the situation under control and resume standard practices at the site. If the newspaper is reporting the information from the scene correctly, which they sometimes do, then I don’t believe that the incident commander could have collected enough information to make that conclusion that the situation is safe and there was no risk to the public.

I make this statement based on my experiences with many hazmat events on campuses that I have responded to. I know that many (most?) hazmat situations won’t have a complete description of contributing factors, corrective actions, and incident impacts at their conclusion, but the speed of declaring a hazmat situation over is often startling to me. (A retired fire marshal has told me that he noticed the same thing from the fire service’s point of view - resources are being released from a hazmat site much quicker today than they used to be.)

I would note that one current exception to this phenomenon is the YMCA pool in Massachusetts which has been shut down since their chlorine release two weeks ago. That event put 7 children in the hospital. On the other hand, have other high school chemistry labs in Virginia been put on hold after last week’s lab fire? (I don’t know the answer to this question.) And is Virginia the correct area to assess the level of response to this event (we’re back to the denominator question).

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org

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