I’m hoping this isn’t urgent and just satisfies my curiosity! A while ago I heard a huge crashing boom which shook my house and made the lights flicker. There was nothing on the news about it then, but now they’re all “Possible explosion at duct tape and adhesives plant!” The plant is maybe 4 or 5 miles from my house, which makes me wonder how loud the explosion was if you were there. The plant is also by the railroad, which brings up specters of the chlorine leaking wreck a few months ago to all of us. There’s smoke in the air here, but the news says they’re monitoring air safety and they’ll tell us if anything happens. At the moment, of course, nobody knows what’s going on.
Now, it’s nearly midnight and I have to be up at 6. I kind of feel like this is a stupid question, but; will they call me or knock on my door if it does happen to be, say, deadly chlorine gas? Of course, I’m watching the TV to see if they find out what it is, but I’d sleep a lot sounder if I knew what the procedure was for middle-of-the-night emergency evacuations. I’d feel real dumb if I missed it and woke up to a ghost town, but then again it’s probably nothing to worry about. Right? I’d be more convinced of that if the smoke weren’t making my eyes water a little bit.
Well, it turned out to be harmless (except to the one person and several injured at the plant itself), as the nasty solvents were elsewhere in the plant, but I’m still interested in the question. Do they go around with loudspeaker trucks? How exactly do you go about evacuating a really big residential area in a hurry?
I ran into a fireman at lunch today, and asked him this very question, as I had seen it this morning.
the answer was simple. If they needed you out of the area, the local police (and those of surrounding towns) would have come knocking on your door. In some cases, the decision may be made to have you stay in your home, and NOT come out, as that may be safer, depending on the incident.
If you’re really curious, you can access the ERPs (Emergency Response Plan) of your town for what the details would be.
I used to live about a mile from several refineries and the area had an emergency siren system (probably just the old tested on Tuesday air raid units) and a shelter-in-place plan. Everyone got fridge magnets and stickers explaining to bring in the kids and pets, shut all doors and windows and sit tight if the sirens go off. Tune to one of these radio or TV stations and wait for information and instructions.
In the refinery towns around Houston, there is an automated telephone system. When there is an emergency, the “authorities” can simply draw a circle on a map and all of the phone numbers inside that circle get a call with instructions. I believe that even the City of Austin (with relatively few refineries) has such a system in case of toxic spills, train derailments, etc. If your area has such a dangerous neighbor in the community, surely they have a plan for dealing with accidents. If not, as you drift into permanent slumber, know that your heirs will have a nice settlement from the polluter that killed you. :eek:
Well, the good news is that even though I might have risked permanent slumber, I wasn’t on the national news telling people what the explosion at the South Carolina duct tape factory sounded like. Evidently it blew the top of the boiler 100 yards over a fence and across four lanes of traffic to gouge a nice big hole in the road. I feel very bad for the family of the one man who was killed, but considering the size of the blast it sounds like the plant workers as a whole got off very lucky indeed.