what is considered one of the world’s
worst industrial accidents.
The resulting fire from the Bayer explosion burned for four hours, and
Bayer employees declined to reveal information about the chemicals to emergency responders. A shelter-in-place
order went into effect for approximately
40,000 people in surrounding communities.
If projectiles from the explosion had
dislodged the pipes leading to the MIC
storage tank, Moure-Eraso said, the resulting concentration of MIC in the
closest community could have reached
3 ppm—a level that is immediately
dangerous to life and health, and approximately twice the estimated concentration of the Bhopal release.
The Kleen Energy explosion resulted
from “gas blows,” a practice intended to
protect turbines by clearing pipes of debris that could damage turbine blades.
In gas blows, natural gas is forced
through pipes at high pressure and
vented to the atmosphere. At the Kleen
plant, 15 gas blows over a four-hour
period vented enough natural gas to
power an American home for 25 years,
Moure-Eraso said. The likely cause of
the explosion was a spark from debris
expelled during the gas blows. Six
workers were killed and fifty injured.
As a result of the accident, CSB
called on OSHA to prohibit gas blows,
asked the governor of Connecticut to
prohibit gas blows at power plants
under construction, and requested the
National Fire Protection Association to
address the practice in its guidelines
and standards.
A Holistic Approach
As director of the U.S. Army Institute of
Public Health and deputy director of the
Army’s Public
Health Command,
John Resta has
been instrumental
in helping the
Army adopt a
cross-disciplinary,
holistic approach to
public health. This
holistic view, Resta
said during his general session address
on Tuesday, Nov. 8, encompasses the
John Resta
health of the entire force—including soldiers, their families, civilian employees
and contractors. It also involves taking
advantage of his organization’s ability
to marshal diverse resources and expertise in response to a public health problem.
To illustrate the Army’s new approach,
Resta described his organization’s response to a 2010 Legionella outbreak at
Ft. Selfridge twenty miles outside Detroit. Unlike local public health departments, the Army Public Health
Command has a range of experts at its
disposal, including engineers, industrial
hygienists, risk communicators, epidemiologists and occupational medicine
practitioners. In a traditional Army intervention, these professionals would
have worked separately on aspects of
the larger problem; the engineers, for
example, would have concerned themselves solely with the environmental aspects of the outbreak, while leaving the
medical professionals to handle all interactions with people.
The traditional approach also would
have ignored the concerns of the larger
community until they showed up in the
newspapers. Some civilians living near
Ft. Selfridge were convinced that the
outbreak of respiratory illness around
the base was a surefire sign of bird flu.
“By approaching this holistically, we
were able to try and control [those con-cerns] with real information, real science, and then real care,” Resta said.
Challenges in Respiratory Protection
At the 2011 Henry F. Smyth Award Lecture on Nov. 8, Howard Cohen, PhD,
MPH, CIH, advocated practices that
assess the ability of
respirator programs
to protect workers,
in addition to testing the devices
themselves.
“We need to recognize that the effectiveness of any
respirator is dependent on the quality of the program it is
used with,” said Cohen, former editor of
the AIHA Journal and a lecturer at the
Yale School of Public Health. “We have
almost no information on respirator
Howard Cohen
program performance.”
Cohen’s address included a brief reg-
ulatory history of respiratory protection
and a discussion of important research
in the field. Until the 1970s, Cohen said,
air-purifying respirators were assessed
according to their filter or sorbent ca-
pacity. That changed when the Los
Alamos National Laboratory developed
quantitative fit-test methods that meas-
ured leakage around respirator face
pieces.
The seminal studies on respirators
were conducted by Warren Myers in
1983. Myers tested respirators in workplaces and found that they weren’t performing to NIOSH standards. Before
Myers, most respirator studies were
conducted in the laboratory.
Myers’ work “really shook up the res-
pirator community,” Cohen said. “We
had thought lab studies would be a
good predictor of how these respirators
would perform in the workplace.”
In the early 1990s, questions about
workplace studies were raised in the
professional literature. Workplace stud-
ies introduced a number of variables
that couldn’t be controlled and relied on
workers wearing cumbersome sampling
equipment. “Most people don’t want
something up their nose or in their
mouth,” Cohen said. In the 1990s, labo-
ratory studies came back into vogue.
A proper assessment of the protection
afforded to workers would take into
consideration not only the performance
of the device but whether the device is
being worn correctly, Cohen said. “It’s
more than just the device—it’s the entire
program that goes into it.”
What’s In a Name
The transformation of PCIH begun in
2011 will continue this year. The event
has been rechristened the AIHA Fall Conference and will be held in San Antonio,
Texas, Oct. 27–31. Registration opens in
June. In the meantime, visit www.ai-
hafallconference.org for pictures, slides
and audio files from PCIH 2011.
Ed Rutkowski is managing editor of The Synergist.
He can be reached at erutkowski@aiha.org or (703)
