By Phil Parker
The Albuquerque Journal
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — Despite previous findings of deficiencies, Los Alamos National Laboratory continues to lack effective firefighting capacity from the county’s fire department, according to a recent government report.
But a lab spokesman said past issues involving training and communication have been corrected, and firefighters in Los Alamos are better-prepared to respond to an emergency than when the study was commissioned.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of the Inspector General: “For nearly the past 11 years, fire suppression services have not been assured at LANL, placing LANL in a position of unacceptable risk to its facilities, personnel and operations.” Over that span, it says “firefighters did not have the tools they needed to effectively respond to an incident at LANL.”
Los Alamos County Fire Chief Doug Tucker disputed the report’s dire portrayal.
“The report is a snapshot, and I think most folks would disagree” with the findings, said Tucker. “Being in the middle of this I don’t believe (the findings), because we’ve responded to the lab almost daily since I got here, from 1992 to the present.”
But DOE investigators conducted inspections and interviews between August 2008 and February 2009, the report says, and reached numerous damning conclusions about the lab’s readiness against threat of fire.
The report says firefighters did not receive proper training to fight fires in the “unique operating environments” at LANL facilities, specifically involving nuclear materials, explosives, chemical and biological agents, and gases.
Pre-incident plans, required for every facility at LANL, also were found lacking. As an example, the DOE cited a plutonium facility at the lab where radioactive materials were not identified in the preincident plan as fire or health hazards.
The report says magnesium oxide sand is the most effective material for putting out plutonium fires, information not contained within the building’s pre-incident plan.
But LANL spokesman Kevin Roark said the lab has been fixing its dealings with the LAFD.
“We took a bunch of steps,” he said. “Increased training was one of them, and initiating a much simpler way of communicating with the fire department.”
Roark said in January the lab launched a training program specific to radiological hazards and controls, which every Los Alamos firefighter has participated in.
Before the new program was initiated, Los Alamos fire training wasn’t logged in any consequential way. Now, LANL uses a computer system to document both attendance and proficiency. And site-specific training has addressed whether firefighters are prepared for certain types of blazes.
“Experts at LANL are actually doing hands-on training now,” said Tucker. “So folks who handle those materials are telling us about putting out these certain types of fires. ... We get firsthand from them what we need to know to get these fires out.”
Firefighters are being given tours of certain high-hazard facilities, addressing one of the key issues in the DOE’s report: that firefighters did not have a strong enough working knowledge of the buildings to effectively respond to an emergency.
“During our inspection, several LAFD firefighters expressed concern that their lack of knowledge of LANL facilities could impact their ability to effectively respond to an incident,” the study says. It mentions gaps of several years between firefighter tours of sensitive facilities.
These days tours happen each week, according to Tucker.
“Every Friday we do tours at the facilities,” he said. “We have a lot of young folks that haven’t been in these facilities, and if we get inside it takes the mystique out of the building and gives the firefighters the confidence to get safely in and out of the buildings.”
An official response from lab officials is included within the finished DOE report, claiming the inspector general didn’t consider recent improvements.
But the report says “continued actions are required in order to ensure that the risks to LANL’s facilities, personnel and operations are eliminated.”
Roark agreed: “Providing quality fire protection to a facility like ours is a neverending task,” he said. “There’s no end game.”
Copyright 2009 Albuquerque Journal