In the future, we can be surrounded by elaborate warning systems to let us know when a hazardous-materials accident has happened, or we can eliminate the possibility of such accidents. With each decision we make, we determine our future, according to Richard Rich, professor and chair of political science at Virginia Tech.
In the United States in one five-year period, an average of 19 hazardous-materials accidents happened each day. Most of them caused no injuries. Some of them resulted in deaths, hospitalizations, and environmental damage. One chemical leak from a railroad car sent 30,000 people to the hospital; another caused evacuation of 50,000 people.
“We can count on these accidents happening with some regularity, both in the places you might expect because there are industrial facilities, and in places you might not expect because they’re along transportation routes,” Rich says.
Warning systems
Under contract with the Environmental Protection Agency, Rich and David Conn of urban affairs and planning have investigated effective ways to let citizens know they are at risk and to alert them when they need to respond to an actual accident. Their findings:
- People do not pay attention to advance public-service announcements or mailings about risks. “We’re flooded with so many other messages every day that messages about risks get lost,” Rich says.
- People who viewed a videotape illustrating strategies for self protection in a chemical emergency became more aware of their exposure and dramatically increased their knowledge of protective measures.
The researchers used an automated notification system to educate people about the risk in advance of an emergency. “When we added an informational message to a routine test of the phone ‘ring-down’ system designed to call people in their homes when they needed to evacuate or shelter in place, people exhibited dramatically increased awareness of their exposure to risk and knowledge of what to do in the event of an accident,” Rich reports.
He thinks the system works because a phone call is directed specifically at the individual. “The test let them know they live in an area that’s exposed and gave them a reason to pay attention to other information,” he says.
One problem Rich and Conn discovered from following up on several actual emergencies – from warehouse fires to chemical plant explosions – was that people in high-risk areas often did not know what to do in an emergency. When sirens alerted them of an accident, they did not know how to interpret the warning.
Radio emergency-broadcast announcements can help, but an automatic telephone system can target the warning to only homes and businesses that need to act immediately, can give different instructions to different people, and can give instructions in stages to avoid congestion. Back-up systems are needed for people not near a phone.
Also, a phone system can contain explanatory information. “Although it still helps if they know what to do in advance,” Rich says. “If they need a kit to seal windows, for example.”
Emergency-notification technology is being used now in hotels and high-rise office complexes.
Preventing hazards
“The most promising strategies, however,” Rich says, “are proactive” ones, such as:
- Locate hazardous facilities away from populations and environmentally sensitive areas such as water supplies.
- Integrate conventional land-use planning and zoning with hazardous-materials safety precautions. Emergency responders such as fire, police, and environmental-safety officers and land-use planners must talk to each other as communities develop.
In a nationwide review of planning practices, Rich and Conn identified good models to suggest to other states and localities. For example, Florida’s local emergency-planning districts and land-use planning districts have the same boundaries, and the staff for the land-use planning district is also the staff for the local emergency-planning district so each group knows what the other is doing.
“We have proposed strategies for integrating hazardous-materials safety and land-use planning to national organizations,” Rich reports.
Avoid risk in the first place
Industries should substitute non-toxic chemicals for toxic ones whenever possible. Sometimes less-toxic chemicals are cheaper. If not, the fact that they’re more easily recycled and don’t require expensive safety measures to process can make them cheaper in the long run.
Citizens should become aware of the toxic chemicals used in producing everyday products and make choices in the marketplace that discourage the use of harmful chemicals. The key is education, helping both industries and citizens know the risks so they can make intelligent choices.
Will people change? “All around the country today, citizens’ groups are becoming involved with both industry and government in joint efforts to ensure safe production, storage, and transportation of hazardous materials,” Rich says.
But, based on a variety of national surveys, he reports that people are not yet ready to change their lifestyles because they don’t know the immediacy of the situation.
“We must not wait for an environmental crisis. If we’'re concerned about oil-tanker safety, we must drive less. Every time we get in our cars, we create a need to put a few more gallons of crude oil on the oceans.”
What we need, Rich says, is decisive political leadership in making millions of decisions every day. “We need to adopt policies to encourage responsible environmental actions.”
We can become a society dependent on sophisticated warnings of increasingly common environmental accidents – or a society free of most of the risk of such disasters.
The choice is ours.