Local Emergency Planning Committee practices chlorine gas leak

When Rocky Buffum opened the door to the chlorine storage room at Logansport Utilities’ Wastewater Treatment Plant, large white clouds of smoke billowed out. Inside the room, the thick smoke disappeared into inky darkness. Unbeknownst to the two men suiting up to enter the smoky room, a body lay sprawled on the ground just inside the door.

Local first responders practiced their hazmat training Feb. 28 during an annual preparedness exercise that simulated a chlorine gas leak at the wastewater treatment plant. There were no dangerous chemicals anywhere near the site, but everyone involved with the exercise acted as though the threat was real to test how smoothly the operation would run in the event of a real chemical leak.

First responders and members of the Cass County Local Emergency Planning Committee gathered across the street from the wastewater treatment plant at 6 p.m. Firetrucks, a Cass County EMS ambulance and an Emergency Management Agency truck parked in a muddy gravel parking lot on the bank of the Wabash River. Gray water splashed from the puddles on the ground, but first responders paid them no mind; their boots kept their feet dry as they got to work.

Incident command set up a table at one end of the gravel lot. Masks, gloves, rubber boots, oxygen tanks and a variety of other equipment were sorted into piles, ready for the teams who would be entering the chlorine storage room.

At the other end of the lot, first responders set up hazmat decontamination pools, constructed makeshift showers out of PVC pipes, and untangled hoses that would provide water to the showers after they were attached to the firetrucks at the scene.

After everything was in place, the A-team began suiting up. There were multiple teams of two who served as backup but would only go in if the A-team needed their assistance. The two men on the A-team attached their oxygen tanks to their back, pulled on the rubber boots, affixed tools like flashlights and radios to their belts, and had their vitals checked by EMS workers. After situating their oxygen masks, both men had help zipping up their full-body hazmat suits.

Overall, it took about 30 minutes from the start of the exercise to send in the A-team. EMA Director and LEPC Chairman Rocky Buffum later told the group that they beat their deadline by ten minutes.

When the A-team reached the chlorine storage room with their supplies, they opened the door and disappeared into the darkness. Their goal was to find the source of the leak — one of the valves on a one-ton chlorine cylinder — and use a specific valve from their kits to cover the broken valve and contain the leak.

“In the case of an emergency, (the one-ton chlorine cylinder) could be a large risk to Logansport,” A-team member Michael Capitanio said. “By training for this, I would say that the citizens of Logansport are safer than ever in the incident that this container were to fail.”

Despite six weeks of hazmat technician training, Capitanio and his A-team partner Nathan Lococo said there were still some surprises when they entered the chlorine storage room.

“There was zero visibility. It was overwhelming not knowing the way out,” Capitanio said. “We’ve never been in that building prior. It was a challenge to overcome. Just like a structure fire, you don’t know the way out and there’s zero visibility. Once we got our bearings and we got our container, we were able to have a little more visibility because we were right up on it at that point.”

Lococo is a firefighter at the New Waverly Fire Department, and Capitanio is a lieutenant at the New Waverly Fire Department and a firefighter at Cass County Fire District One, so they are used to high-pressure emergency situations. The lack of visibility, however, made it almost impossible to see the mannequin that served as the victim lying on the ground.

“It did throw us for a loop. He was just laying in a corner that we would have never seen,” Lococo said. “We had one beam of light to illuminate a whole room, and we didn’t know he was in there. There’s a skill sheet we have to follow, and I’d read on the skill sheet today that there may or may not be a victim. Knowing Rocky, I kind of figured we might be thrown for that loop, but I figured it would be something we’d see as soon as we walked in. I was definitely not prepared to see it when we were getting ready to exit. We thought our work was done, but it actually wasn’t.”

Lococo said as soon as they noticed the victim, their goal shifted from leaving the room to getting the victim out safely.

“From our perspective, saving lives and preserving the property at risk are our main priorities,” he said. “At that point, anything that we took in was not of value to us anymore. It was dropped, and the victim was rescued and brought to the (decontamination) station.”

With one arm looped under each of the victim’s armpits, the two men dragged the lifeless mannequin out of the chlorine storage room and to the waiting showers. After the victim was hoisted onto a stretcher, a firefighter used a water nozzle to rinse any chemical residue off the mannequin.

Capitanio and Lococo took turns standing under the first shower, getting scrubbed and rinsed by waiting firefighters at the second station, and completing one more rinse before stepping into the clean area and peeling off their hazmat suits.

Once the exercise was finished, Buffum called everyone to the center of the gravel lot to discuss what went well, what needs more work, and any other improvements that can be made. Each group gave input about improvements that can be made for the next exercise or event.

“Hopefully we turn it into an annual thing,” Buffum said. “We identified some things and some processes we don’t have in place. That’s the biggest thing we do these for. It’s not perfect, and we don’t claim to be perfect. We want to find the things we’re missing and find them on an exercise instead of on a real-world incident.”

Buffum and other first responders agreed the more they practice responding to chemical leak situations, the better prepared they’ll be when it happens.

“The whole end goal is just to make Cass County citizens safer,” Capitanio said.

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