RE: Treatment of Contaminated Personnel -Reply

[Michael S Ford <MFORD@pantex.com>]

Rick makes a very good point about the value of an incident
command structure for emergency response.  However, an IC group
is only useful for a prolonged response or recovery where there is
an opportunity and sufficient support for a command group to
assemble and begin to analyze an incident scene.

If there is an incident at a remote location with personnel casualties
-- during transportation, well-logging, industrial radiography, etc. --
local police, fire department responders or paramedics will typically
arrive hours to days before a radiological assistance team can
assemble and be dispatch to the incident site.  By that time, a
non-ambulatory casualty in a very high dose rate area will have
been removed (and local responders exposed) or will still be on
scene and perhaps past the CNS death threshold.

In the highest probability incidents (i.e., public sector) and with few
exceptions, life-savings actions will have commenced and possibly
completed (or abandoned) long before the folks with all of the
proper training and equipment show up.  In those cases, the
radiological assistance folks basically perform a recovery operation.

This points to the need of providing at least some degree of training
to the local initial responders who have little to no equipment, an
at-best cursory understanding of the hazards and are often exposed
to the highest risk without realizing it.

Have a great day!
v/r
Michael
mford@pantex.com
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