It was a mere walk through of a disaster situation earlier this month, but nevertheless, it showed how important each step is to effectively handle the situation if a disaster were to ever arise for real.
Nearly 40 concerned citizens from various provincial government agencies, emergency services and municipal bodies lined Municipal District of Taber council chambers, which served as a command centre for an emergency disaster simulation exercise entitled, Sudden Impact.
Sudden Impact involved a train derailment after impacting a car with two passengers within the jurisdiction of the M.D. of Taber, but impacted the citizens of the Town of Taber as well. The scenario involved the train derailing at 5:45 p.m. on an overcast day with light winds at six kilometres per hour at a temperature of minus-one degree Celsius with clearing over night. The eastbound CP train consisted of 117 cars with a mixture of freight and dangerous goods, and derailed near the level crossing at the junction of Highway 864 and Highway 3. The emergency stop by the conductor caused a derailment that blocked Highway 864 and 50th Street. The derailment involved 21 of the cars that derailed, which involved 10 freight cars and 11 with dangerous goods. Of the 11 dangerous goods, some included two with anhydrous ammonia, two LPG, three diesel and two gasoline. Two of the cars were severely damaged and breached.
“The potential and the probability is high with regards to dangerous goods, especially within the M.D. with the amount of product on road and rail and in all the surrounding area with gas and oil,” said Don Huestis, a facilitator of the disaster simulation with Pamadon Resource Limited, that helps with emergency management needs as a consultant. “A lot of people figure it will never happen in their area. But believe me in my business it is just a matter of when and not a question of if. We’ve had a significant number of derailments all across the province over the last number of years. We’ve been totally lucky in that none of them have typically happened in urban areas and had they happened in urban areas, we didn’t have any releases.”
A breached cart in the simulation involved a fire and the release of anhydrous ammonia, which is a toxic inhalation hazard. The vapour cloud of the ammonia shows a maximum range of 2.3 kilometres at night going north from the incident site and spreading out. A similar incident happened in Red Deer in 2001 that involved the evacuation of 5,000 people with one fatality.
“Oddly enough, anhydrous ammonia was not classified as dangerous goods in the past, but because of incidents like that derailment, it became a dangerous good in the emergency response guide book,” said Huestis.
The exercise involved first-response members, including site manager, which deputy fire chief Chris Livingstone was chosen at the point of derailment, with chief Mike Bos out of town at the time of the mock disaster scenario, co-ordinating initial efforts to block off roads, evacuate affected citizens, put out fires etc. for an incident action plan.
“With this particular incident there is no question in my mind that this is a fire issue and that the fire department will assume the role of site manager,” said Huestis. “We want the best people to deal with the situation at the site and we want the best people dealing with the situation at the EOC (Emergency Operations Centre). I don’t care what the emergency management system that you use, you won’t have success unless you get the key players like your elected officials, your director of emergency management, your CAO, your public information officer, your public works guy, a delegated fire guy, RCMP, town police, and it would be nice to have people from Alberta Environment and Health all co-ordinated in an EOC.”
The number of people potentially affected by the mock derailment could be immense, as highlighted with the scenario of escaping hydrous ammonia at the site with prevailing winds out of the southwest. It would include the Taber Hospital and Clearview Lodge, where elderly or sick people who could not be moved in a evacuation plan would have to be put in lockdown with HVAC systems shutdown in the buildings. Throw in schools in the area that may have evening events going on in their respective gymnasiums or have classes the next day in a cleanup effort that is expected to take days, and there are numerous variables the M.D. of Taber would have to engage. And not only the M.D., but the Town of Taber and other communities like the Village of Barnwell and the Town of Vauxhall and Grassy Lake would have to partner in with such an undertaking where the M.D. initially declares a state of local emergency and the powers it grants.
“For all municipalities involved here, never assume that because the Town of Taber who has been severely impacted by this have been notified by this and they have their EOC activated. The respective directors of emergency management should have a formal or informal agreement that they are going to notify each other. We have mutual-aid agreements in place,” said Huestis. “The incident we are discussing here, in my estimation, before the product is removed from all the cars and the mess is cleaned up is approximately two to four days. I don’t know of any municipality in the province of Alberta that has enough municipal staff to activate an EOC efficiently for a two-to-four-day stretch, and I am including Calgary in that capacity. Co-operation is key. The idea of mutual aid is not just a fire-related thing, it’s an emergency-management-related thing.”
The walk through of the derailment simulation helped members of the M.D. of Taber, Town of Taber, Barnwell and Vauxhall and provincial governing bodies that were on hand to do a gap analysis in ironing out the kinks in delivering communication and needed services among the various stakeholders in emergency response in aiding citizenry.