SIDEBAR

Mill operations resume

RUMFORD – Friday was business as usual at NewPage paper mill, a day after a chemical reaction exposed nine workers to a chlorine vapor. Sixty other workers in the affected building were also evacuated.

“Everything is back to normal,” mill spokesman Tony Lyons said by phone Friday afternoon. The injured “employees all got a clean bill of health and are scheduled to come back to work on their normal shifts.”

The mill is withholding names of the seven men and two women.

The liquid chemicals involved in the incident were sodium hypochlorite, a strong bleaching agent that was being transferred inside a preparation area where substances are mixed, and muriatic acid, also known as hydrochloric acid, a corrosive agent.

Workers were piping one chemical from a 250-gallon plastic drum into another drum containing a different chemical when the accident happened. During the transfer of two chemicals that are not supposed to be mixed together, a small amount of chlorine gas was released.

“It shouldn’t have happened, but the circumstances are still being investigated,” Lyons said.

An Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigator was also at the mill on Friday. Mill officials notified OSHA the day of the incident, as required, according to both Lyons and OSHA acting area director Anthony Lemire.

Lemire said by phone Friday afternoon in Augusta that it was too soon to decide when the results would be released, or if any fines would be levied.

Med-Care exposed to state judgment on decontamination

MEXICO – Thursday’s response to the NewPage chemical release accident is expected to carry repercussions for Med-Care Ambulance, Director Dean Milligan said Friday, because the state said patients were not 100 percent decontaminated before going to the hospital.

Before the incident, Milligan said he’d been trying to get Maine Emergency Medical Services to establish a definitive standard that, in hazardous materials-related incidents, affected people are not placed in an ambulance unless they are fully decontaminated.

“That’s the dilemma we were faced with yesterday,” he said Friday afternoon. “Right now, we only have our common sense and our best judgment to guide us in what we will and will not do.”

When he delayed sending ambulances in immediately on arrival, it angered some mill officials, he said.

“I understand that anxiety is high, but with a (hazardous materials) situation, you have to slow down. If you’re not meticulous in the way you handle it, you’ll end up with more people contaminated and, it makes the situation worse.

“You don’t just rush in to hazmats. They wanted us in there immediately, and we said, ‘No,’ and that ruffled feathers. Our response is to make sure that we don’t do anything to endanger our staff,” he said.

Med-Care’s initial radio dispatch summoning them to the mill at 1:11 p.m., was that some sort of chemical release had occurred and two people were down.

“That’s all we had. When we arrived, we staged at the lower gate and asked a few questions, like, what happened? What types of chemicals are we dealing with? and, What types of injuries? What we got from them was that they were still unsure.

“The only thing they knew was that at least two people were down and, they wanted us to go right in, and we said we were not,” Milligan said.

Additionally, Med-Care only had three of its six ambulances available and staffed at the time of the incident.

“With these types of events, historically, there’s a very high potential for more than two people to be injured,” Milligan said.

That’s why he quickly called in four more ambulances from Andover, Bethel, and West Paris, he said.

Then, when his hunch proved right and they were told there were at least five injured, he called for two ambulances from Farmington. The number of injured soon went to nine.

But, 15 minutes after Med-Care and firefighters arrived, mill officials still hadn’t identified the chemicals.

“We didn’t officially get notified what the chemicals were until about 45 minutes to an hour later,” Milligan said.

He did send paramedic Chris Moretto in to assess the situation, then Rumford firefighters took a firetruck in, and established a field decontamination area in which five of the injured stripped and were deluged with water before being transported, but it wasn’t a full decontamination with meticulous cleansing.

“Nobody had signs of irritated skin or burns, but (the vapor) was in their clothes,” Milligan said.

The other four people were decontaminated in the mill’s medical department at their request, then later asked to be taken by ambulance to Rumford Hospital with the others.

“We were 100 percent confident these people were fully decontaminated. We’re going to be taken to task on it (by the state), but I’m OK with that.

“I’m going to use this real-life scenario and move it through the county and Maine EMS in a positive manner to help all the other EMS agencies have a standard, so that when we’re told, ‘You will do this,’ we can,” Milligan said.