Facts on emergency response

[BLHamrick@AOL.COM]

Just out of curiosity, I took a look at some numbers to support the logistics problem of proper immediate response to radiological events.  L.A. County Fire has 5619 emergency response personnel (and, remember there's also LA City Fire, and numerous other City Fire Departments throughout LA County, plus police and sheriffs, so we're talking well over 20,000 first responders in the LA area alone).


LA County Fire responds to about 234,000 events per year.  My prior experience with LA County was that perhaps 1 - 2 of those events per year involved some type of radioactive materials (e.g., a pharmacy truck involved in an accident, or a "drug lab" where some stray uranyl nitrate is found).


Even the LA City Bomb Squad responds to about 900 events a year, and maintains a staff of only about 14 people (this is all information published on the web, BTW, at their official sites), and in about five years with LA County, none of those involved radioactive material.


For both LA County Fire and the LA City Bomb Squad, these numbers amount to about .02 persons per event.  Thus, even one radiological expert responder is about 50 times too many based on number of incidents.  


LA County Fire saw 16 civilian fatalities and 1227 civilian fire injuries over last year.  No one knows the number of fatalities and injuries averted, but we know the number of radiological fatalities, and we know the number averted, a big fat zero.


We also know that for the most part an RDD will do more psychological damage than real damage, and that fatalities and injuries are likely to be caused by the blast, not the radioactive component.  


All that said, our dollars probably need to go into better communications, so the experts can be reached in a timely manner, and over-response averted where possible.


Barbara