Expanded Roles
Today's devices are far more capable than in the past, aiding responders who have much broader roles since 9/11.
Editor's note: Rapid innovation in user-friendly radiation detection devices is helping emergency responders and civilian users alike, says Thea Philliou, a first responder applications specialist for Thermo Electron's Security group. Products are increasingly smarter, stronger, and smaller in response to users' needs, she explained in a March 1, 2005, conversation with Occupational Health & Safety's editor. Excerpts from the conversation follow.
These products help first responders, and also people doing routine monitoring, detect radiation?
Thea Philliou: We deal with both civilian and military responders. You could break it down into two basic applications. The first would be more of a tactical operation--basically, some type of response to an event which has already occurred. The second application is more of an intelligence gathering/routine monitoring, where people are basically looking to prevent some type of accident or some type of crime. They're looking to catch something before it becomes an incident.
These would be hazmat teams, fire department hazmat teams, as a rule? Who's the primary audience?
Philliou: We really run the full gamut, depending on each city and agency and how it's structured. We deal with hazmat teams, whether that be police and/or fire, depending on how the municipality is structured. We've got pretty equal numbers of both sets of customers . . . as well as civil defense teams and special operations teams, too, that have more, let's say, mission-specific applications.
Are these mission-specific applications coming about as a result of 9/11? Did fire and hazmat teams even have to concern themselves with radiation monitoring before then?
Philliou: In most cities and towns up until recently, radiation has pretty much primarily fallen under hazmat, which in most cases falls under the realm of fire department response. . . . Fire departments in a lot of cases, historically, have sort of picked up everything except drugs--basically toxic substances of all sorts that were involved in any type of spill or accident.
What's happened more since 9/11 is, police and police hazmat departments have become involved in a much different way. Because with a lot of these incidents, it's not clear at the incident if there is a law enforcement issue--whether it is a routine industrial accident or if in fact they need to rule out any possible terrorist or hostile acts.
Historically, though, fire departments probably since about the time of the Cuban missile crisis have had radiation detection equipment on all the trucks. Very antiquated equipment, which probably up until 9/11 hadn't been under a big push to replace and modernize, had been part of very early civil defense . . . . A lot of that equipment hadn't been too thoughtfully updated until the past several years.
And that has happened by now?
Philliou: I'm not sure how many of those earlier models are still around. I know we still see a lot of them when we go out and visit customers. There's a lot of this earlier technology out there. A lot of the grants in the past several years that have been going on [addressed this]. It started with the larger cities, the major metropolitan areas that are considered more under threat or a target.
There's still a good number of more simple devices out there, but from what I've seen there's been a huge push to raise the bottom line. Even the smallest towns and the humblest fire departments--volunteer fire departments included--there really is a big effort to get them on board with more standardized equipment or at least more up-to-date equipment, so that if an incident does show up and there is an interagency response, everyone who shows up at the scene is at least speaking the same language and able to converse with compatible equipment types.
That's very interesting. I wouldn't have guessed it got down to the volunteer department level. That's pretty much nationwide.
Philliou: I'm always amazed at the grants and the phone calls I get from small towns and these volunteer fire departments. It's a trickle-down effect. Sometimes they might get a few thousand dollars here or there, but with the push toward training and to get all levels of townships and response teams on board with training, at least there's a lot of crosstalk and sharing of information.
Maybe they can't afford an entire suite of products that a larger metropolitan area could, but there's definitely a lot of training going on down at the ground level. They're aware of what the larger counties and cities have and are trying to work in a much more interoperable and compatible way with those larger areas.
This article originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.