Disaster Drill Turns Up Deadly Delay Response Time ‘Not Acceptable’ For Hazardous Materials Team

A communication glitch during a mock train accident Wednesday would have killed nearly two dozen people had the event been real.

The glitch between local and state dispatchers more than doubled the time a hazardous materials team needed to respond to a simulated chlorine leak near Rathdrum. Firefighters estimated the cloud would have spread considerably east of the city limits, where they had hoped to contain the plume.

By then, exercise organizers had identified 25 people who would have died had the incident been real. Twenty other casualties, including three people that would have been critically injured, also were identified.

Only three fatalities were anticipated going into the exercise.

“That shows us that the extreme delay in the response of the haz-mat team to get the leak sealed caused several more people to lose their lives,” said Bill Schwartz, county disaster services director. “That’s not acceptable.”

State hazardous material teams are dispatched by a Boise office at the request of local authorities. Organizers hope to determine today why it took so long for Wednesday’s request to be granted.

A reasonable Kootenai County response time is about an hour from the team’s Post Falls quarters. The team arrived more than two hours after authorities requested that state dispatchers send them.

“Where it went wrong I don’t know, but we’ve got to find out,” Schwartz said.

The train wreck, staged at Highway 53 and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe switching station, was designed to test county emergency response plans. Rathdrum was chosen as the disaster site because of the 60-plus trains that roll out of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe switching yard daily.

Organizers said the drill had been planned for three years and was not related to a diesel refueling depot being studied near Hauser. Flooding last spring forced the exercise to be rescheduled for this year.

County disaster services workers will spend the next month correcting faulty response procedures. Overall, disaster services officials said the drill was successful.

Dozens of local firefighters, medics, police officers and railroad representatives participated in the six-hour drill.

An anonymous report of the smell of bleach surrounding a train derailment kicked off the exercise about 9:25 a.m.

Firefighters and police officers established a perimeter about a mile in each direction around the mock spill. Fire trucks and ambulances lined up at a command post near Burlington and Chase roads.

“We have a chlorine leak,” said Rathdrum Fire Chief Wayne Nowacki, who assumed the role of incident commander. “I don’t know what the quantity is. It’s going east.”

Four other train cars involved in a “routine switching incident” also were in the area, said Gus Melonas, Burlington Northern Santa Fe spokesman. Cargo in those cars included various hazardous materials and potatoes.

Students at Betty Kiefer Elementary were evacuated by bus as part of the exercise.

John Brown, Mountain View Alternative School, Lakeland senior and junior high and Garwood Elementary schools students would have been evacuated but were not because it was a drill.