RE: Dirty Bomb

One comment struck me yesterday (belatedly of course) about the major effect of Windscale was scaring British mommies. So I'm thinking, who are the most influential people in society--the ones people always blame for their successes but never for their failures, the ones who make the majority of home buying and improvement decisions, and are the most populous nationally and globally? These are the people the anti's are focused on scaring (because they're better at this than we are), and it's the same group we need to reach. When designing an organization's emergency preparedness notification program about 10 years ago, we gave the primary responsibility to the women (various irrelevant reasons). But I think the bottom line is to consider who the target audience is, so to speak, and tailor your communications accordingly. What good does it do to convince the mail room clerk when the CEO makes the decisions?

Jack Earley
Radiological Engineer

-----Original Message-----
From: BLHamrick@aol.com [mailto:BLHamrick@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 8:13 PM
To: radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu
Subject: Re: Dirty Bomb

In a message dated 05/15/2002 7:03:40 AM Pacific Daylight Time, kemps89@yahoo.com writes:

The point I'd like to make is that groups need to do a
better job educating the public. Do things like go to
high school physics classes and talk about radiation
or help put on continuing ed classes for fire/EMS
workers.

This is extremely important. We all need to get involved, especially now. I have done a lot of training for Hazmat teams, bomb squads, and fire departments, and they, one and all, really want to know what the actual, realistic life-threatening risks are. These are men and women that potentially put their lives on the line everyday, and they are extremely receptive to a very commonsense approach about radioactive materials.

Generally, they do not have a lot of training in this area, and it is often a revelation to learn about background radiation, as so many have been trained to back off at the unrestricted area limit of 2 millirem in any one hour. Once they recognize that the public dose is 100 millirem in a year, that background gives them about 300 millirem in a year, that the occupational dose is 5,000 in a year, and the recommendations on voluntary lifesaving activities are in the range of 75,000 to 100,000 millirem, they realize quite readily that much of the popular information they have seen on radiation is little more than fear-mongering rhetoric. Above all, these men and women are extraordinarily practical. Their lives depend upon it.

There is one thing I always emphasize in my training with first responders, and that is, I cannot train them, in one hour, or 24 hours, to be experts. The most important thing for them to know, in my opinion, is their limitations.

I can provide them information on ways to make decisions about the situation and I can provide them information on potential risks, but I can't, and no one can, tell them how to assess every potential radiological hazard at the site of an emergency. That's not a limitation on our knowledge of radiation and radioactive materials, that is simply a limitation on the human ability to assess and collate a multitude of factors in any emergency situation.

To put these risks into perspective, for my own understanding of the complications associated with emergency circumstances, I imagine the situation where we have a first responder team, entering an area known to have been contaminated from the blast of a "dirty bomb," and due to the inefficient dispersal of the material, there may well be areas in the 1,000 R/hr range. If the first responders make a wholly innocent misjudgement in this situation and enter for lifesaving purposes (before there are health physicists present to more adequately assess the situation), and the first responders accumulate 500 or 700 R, and potentially face death, how exactly is this different from the first responders at the World Trade Center, who entered buildings with structural weaknesses that posed a serious threat of death at that time? It is not different. The threats in an emergency situation can be unpredictable, and fatal, but the solution is not to eliminate the use o! f radioactive material, anymore than we should eliminate the use of skyscrapers. The best we can do is to educate our responders as best we possibly can, without making them crazy with radiation physics or civil engineering data, and to acknowledge the courage they have demonstrated in taking on such a serious and threatening task to the benefit of all society.

Barbara