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Steve Furnace Transcript Three : Florida Division of Environmental Health

This is a full transcript of the online presentation. For the presentation itself, go here.

Presented by: Steve Furnace, AA, RSO, Hazmat Specialist
Bureau of Radiation Control
Division of Environmental Health
Contact Number: 407-297-2096 Ext. 214

Hello, my name is Steve Furnace, and I’m with the Bureau of Radiation Control. My phone number is 407-297-2096. One of the duties I have here at the Bureau of Radiation Control is training first responders and how to respond to a radiological accident. In this module I’m going to talk about decontamination disposal and documentation.

Something about on scene accident response. If a package, if you come up to an accident site on a local highway site here in Florida, chances are your going to find a package that could be containing a radiopharmaceutical drug. If the package is breached or is suspected of leaking naturally you want to keep the public away and setup a boundary around it. Don’t let people walk into it and naturally if anybody you suspected touched the material they have to stay and be surveyed for possible contamination. If you have a first responder, and you suspect his hands are contaminated, lukewarm water, lots of it is, copious amounts of it is good for decontaminating your hands. Remember the water, hold onto the water, because we’re going to have to check it out.

Setting up for a hotline. Well a hotline should be approximately 150 feet, from that you can have the warm zone. The warm zone can be as big as you want it to be, 10 feet to 100 feet, in that warm zone area you’ll have your decon corridor and you can have your shower setup. After that you into the cold zone and when someone works there way thru that line these people are surveyed clean should be contamination free.

Equipment de-contamination, critical hand held equipment. You can try to wipe it with a damp sort of cloth and see if you can decon your own equipment. Truthfully I recommend that you take a survey meter and you take the whole meter and put it in a plastic bag. It’s better off to contaminate the plastic bag instead of the meter.

Let’s say you have some contamination on you. A good way is to use a tape press, get masking tape and if you have a spot of contamination you found on your arm, take the masking tape press it against the contaminated area, remove the tape press, take it to a meter, take a reading, the contamination is removable, the contaminated masking tape will then go into a plastic bag, resurvey the mans arm, if its clean then they can go on home. Always use non-abrasive material, soap very benign soap don’t use lava soap to clean people, you could actually push radioactive material into the skin.

Equipment decon. Again for equipment decontamination everything has to be controlled. You’ll have to survey that equipment. Might, if it’s contaminated and you cannot decon the equipment you’re going to have to hold it for disposal and contract us again at the Bureau of Radiation Control and more than likely we’ll go ahead and take control of the material and get it out the state to a proper disposal site.

For decontaminating workers. Well again remove their outer clothing; you can get 80% the contamination off a person’s body by just removing their clothing. When you discard their clothing, put it into a plastic bag with that persons name, make sure again always resurvey the people for contamination before you let them go, and you have to think about protecting personal privacy so you might have to set up tents or something.

Again use always use soft cloth, no abrasive soap, you may have too use copious amounts of soap, and pay special attention to the hair. Alpha particles, hair will shield alpha radiation if you can’t get the alpha radiation out of the hair only thing you have too do is wash it and then resurvey the hair. If it’s still not out of the hair well you’re going to have to cut the hair, don’t shave it, cut the hair, and again that is going to go into a plastic bag with that person’s name. Why we want that persons name, is we’re going to take this material and account it and try to identify the actual isotope they were exposed to.