Hazmats

When the devil is the passenger

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

8/11/01

Last night, I dreamed that I was listening to a CD. Mercifully, it being a dream, I couldn’t actually hear the CD. I just dreamed I was listening to it. The CD was called "Popping Some Caps", and it was described as "Lite ‘N Easy Rap Medleys" as performed by William Shatner and Michael Jackson.

Obviously, some nightmares can convey horror that annihilates reason. This dream, clearly, was one of them.

But the worst nightmares stalk the earth outside the fevered imaginings of subconscious, and often appear no more evil than a well-meaning politician looking at the bottom line on the cost of implementing a safety standard and deciding that option "B" will be adequate for most circumstances.

In waking times, it was brought to my attention that in the case of that tunnel fire in Baltimore that erupted in early July, the train cars in the tunnel burned at 1,500 degrees for over 36 hours. Most hazardous material containers have standards well below that, some as low as 1,000 degrees for twenty minutes. It depends, of course, on the hazardous material. Radioactive waste–the sort of stuff that comes from the X-ray labs of hospitals (Hazmat 2911) and not spent nuclear fuel cores (Hazmat 2977)–is set at a standard of 1,400 degrees for two hours. It’s worth noting that had that train had such material involved in the fire, it may not have caused any immediate health crisis, but they may have had to shut the tunnel down for many years, disrupting freight traffic along the eastern seaboard on a permanent basis. Obviously, even a low level risk like medical gear with contamination can have serious consequences.

Ten years ago, a train carrying metam sodium, a fungicide, spilled into the Sacramento River. The river was sterilized for fifty miles downstream, and dozens of people in the sparsely populated area sickened. The river recovered, as did most of the people, but had the circumstances been a bit different, hundreds could have been killed by the gases released by the hazardous material reacting with the water. The gasses released were those that killed thousands in Bhopal, India, in the early 1980s.

Excuse me. Did I say hazardous material? I misspoke. The substance that could, upon being mixed with water, kill thousands, is to this day not listed as a hazardous material. The manufacturers and farmers complained that the cost of the extra precautions needed would increase shipping costs and adversely affect profits.

So don’t assume that black tanker car on the train going by is benign just because it doesn’t have the Hazmat rectangular placard on it. It might just be milk. Or it might be metam sodium.

But there are literally thousands of trucks and tankers on our highways and railways that do sport those placards, and they cover a wide variety of possibilities. I have a slightly out of date copy of the North American Emergency Response Guidebook (1996 edition) and it gives a comprehensive list of all those 4-digit numbers on the rectangles.

If you are stuck in a traffic jam and you notice the tanker in front of you has the placard, the book can tell you what it is you are sitting scant feet from, and what you should do first if you notice it’s leaking.

The number 1365 means that the cargo is cotton. Cotton is listed as a hazmat because the loose fibers are combustible, and can cause quite an explosion, and cotton itself is flammable. Sometimes the contents are not especially toxic or explosive, but have a potentially high nuisance value. For example, 2216 is fish scraps, stabilized. Mostly the significant feature of this is that it smells bad. It could, in an accident, present an obvious risk to health of those in the vicinity, but if it was the worst thing you might find lurking behind those signs, life wouldn’t be quite so scary.

Most of the placard numbers are not highlighted, and you simply look to see what the three digit number (from 111 to 172) next to the substance name or placard number is and look in the guide section, marked orange for quick access, to find out, step by step, what the Haz-mat First Responders will do to deal with the substance. The general tone of these can ranged from "hold your nose and hope you don’t stub your toe on anything while cleaning the mess up" to "run like hell and forget about ever having children even if you do survive". The first guide, number 111, is probably the one most often used because it is simply a generic one for dealing with an unknown but potentially dangerous substance.

If you see a tanker lying on its side and you look up the number in your handy guide and see that it’s highlighted, yellow in the yellow area or blue in the blue area, that means you have a very serious problem and need to turn to the green area right away. The number 1026, for example, means that the vehicle had cyanogen, and if it’s leaking, the first thing you want to do is get at least 200 feet upwind, sternly ordering your skin and eyes to absorb nothing while doing so. You probably won’t make it, but it can’t hurt to try. When the First Responders turn up, they’ll evacuate the area, up to 3.5 miles downwind if it’s nighttime. (Evacuation zones are larger at night, since substances tend to stay more at ground level in the cool, wet air of evening).

Any number that is highlighted in the guidebook is bad news. Usually it means an immediate evacuation, and it means the substance involved is toxic, caustic, explosive, combustible, flammable, radioactive, and/or can polymerize in a variety of ways, mostly involving large and toxic explosions.

The depressing thing about this guidebook (available  through the Department of Transportation) is not only the large number and quantity of materials being shipped about the country, but how often you see some of those numbers that merit highlighting. I used to live near railroad tracks at one time, and I would watch the tankers going by and wonder what would happen in the event of a derailment. Some friends of mine did have to wait on US 101 for three hours once because an unknown but potentially hazarous material was leaking from a train. (Response 111 in the orange guide of the handbook). Turned out it was only molasses. The biggest threat would be ants.

What’s really disconcerting is the enormous pressure brought to bear by the business community to downgrade the seriousness of the dangers of some of these substances, and to resist listing some, such as the above-noted metam sodium. Unfortunately, the present administration is more than willing to oblige them, since it’s unfair, they say, to burden people with regulations and rules when all they want to do is get cyanogens from point "A" to point "B" as cheaply, easily and quickly as possible. In a world where freeways didn’t have degrading road surfaces and maniacal drivers on crank, and the railways weren’t under maintained by entities interested in saving money, it might not matter so much. But between the degrading infrastructure, and the strong pressure to lower health and safety standards, the possibility of a Bhopal here continues to climb.

I think I’ll go out and buy that dream CD. It doesn’t seem like such a nightmare now.

But I’ll try not to think too hard about what substances it’s made from, and how they were shipped to the factory.