Chemical Spill Response: How Dow is Training Small Town America to Handle Hazmat Emergencies

Chemical giant Dow brings free chemical-spill education and awareness to emergency responders who might otherwise be left untrained

By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor

October 14, 2009 — CSO —

How prepared are emergency responders to deal with a chemical spill that could have serious health an environmental implications? The answer to that varies widely depending on the size of the community and the budget of the emergency departments. That's where a program called TRANSCAER comes in.

TRANSCAER, which stands for Transportation Community Awareness and Emergency Response, is a national outreach effort that brings chemical and transportation industry experts into local communities to provide free transportation and chemical safety training to emergency personnel. The Dow Chemical Company has been running the program for 23 years and has seen it expand significantly in recent years. Dow recently partnered with Union Pacific to bring training to all communities along the companies' shared routes by 2012 and expects more growth in the future by brining the program to communities in Mexico and Canada.

The program brings emergency responders from small communities into hands-on training sessions that focus on railroad equipment training, hazardous material handling and emergency response drills. Tim Scott, chief security officer and director of emergency services and security for Dow, gave CSO an overview of the program and its mission.

Also see the companion slideshow with images from training in the field

The TRANSCAER program is free training for responders in communities that might not be able to afford it otherwise. Tell us more about that:
The program is really designed to get out to the small communities. The people that really benefit from this are the small cities that don't have the big budgets to send responders to a course like this. Typically it would be a thousand dollars a person to go to a course like this. We do a whistle stop tour and we stop and do a one-day course in these communities. We go from small city to small city because that is the audience we are looking to touch.

This program has been around for 23 years. What's changed since its inception?
Since 2001, a lot has changed. A lot more people have become engaged in it. There is a lot more community involvement, a lot more government involvement. The program started with two companies out doing their own program and working with it with their local communities. But it has now expanded to dozens of companies involved across the nation. Various industry associations are involved now and a lot of government agencies are involved. So it has grown from a few people sitting in a conference room to hundreds of people working on this process across the nation. Through the years we have helped train and raise the awareness of literally thousands of responders.

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