RE: Treatment of Contaminated Personnel

["Edwards, Richard W" <Richard.Edwards@PSS.Boeing.com>]

I highly discourage using integrating instrumentation to determine high dose rates unless we know quite a bit about the behavior of that particular instrument at those rates. Every instrument I have exhibits a significant departure from linearity when pushed past it's designed range of operation. There may be cases in which the rate independence of a system is significantly greater than it's ability to display dose rates, but I would want to prove it in a calibration lab first.

To get closer to the original topic, from a practical standpoint, some situations are no-win unless we redefine win to mean "We didn't lose a responder as well as a victim." In the case of a victim, lying in an area where the dose rates are in excess of >1000 R/hr, the likelihood that the victim will have already received a lethal dose prior to rescue is pretty high. As such, is it reasonable to put a responder in jeopardy to take a futile action, no matter how much it goes against the grain to do nothing?

Reducing errors in judgment that result in the loss of emergency responders for no gain is the one reason behind an Incident Command System. Such a system establishes a command structure with a generalist leadership used to making tough decisions in emergency situations supported by specialists with knowledge about the risks inherent in specific hazards (such as exposures to ionizing radiation). As a specialist, it is my job to give the incident commander (IC) the best information I can and let him make the call from valid information. That might mean extrapolating dose rate measurements made at a distance and taking an educated guess such as "The time to a lethal exposure in that area is on the order of one hour, five minutes or 30 seconds (as the case may be). Responders should only have 1% (2%, 5% or whatever it is based on your response criteria) of that." Then it's the IC's call.

Rick Edwards, Analyst
The Boeing Company
richard.w.edwards@boeing.com

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