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Denver hazmat team decries lack of equipment

Emergency Management Alert, March 13, 2003

Members of Denver's hazardous materials team say the city is woefully unprepared for a chemical or biological attack by terrorists because it lacks basic equipment to identify substances such as anthrax, the Denver Post reports.

The 90-member Denver team says it is good at decontamination when the substance is known, but unknown agents cause serious problems. Capt. Dave Frank says it would cost $200,000 for equipment and training the hazmat team needs to identify chemicals, but city officials cite a lack of available funds.

The team's concerns include the following:

* The team lacks equipment to detect nerve agents, anthrax, pepper spray, and several other biological and chemical weapons.

* The team can identify a substance as radioactive but cannot determine its half-life, which indicates how long the substance will remain dangerous. This means the team would not know if a substance were Iodine-123, with a half-life of 13 days, or plutonium, with a half-life of 24,000 years.

* There are only two decontamination tents that together can process up to 200 people an hour. If an unknown substance is dispersed into a large area, decontamination of thousands of victims would take hours, if not days.

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