ASHLAND — Ashland City police, fire, Emergency Management Agency, State Highway Patrol and other Ashland County personnel practiced a full-scale hazardous materials exercise at the Bostik chemical plant on Tuesday morning.
Fire trucks, squad cars and ambulances packed the Bostik parking lot, located at 1745 Cottage St., for the annual training.
“This exercise is designed to test local emergency response procedures and inter-agency coordination in the event of a hazardous materials incident,” according to an Ashland County EMA press release.
What did personnel do?
The scenario featured a catastrophic failure in the process of unloading a chemical which resulted in a fire, a product leak and the injury of an operator, Ashland City Fire Division Captain Rob McCrea said.
The chemical was methyl ethyl ketone, which is a highly flammable industrial solvent. Bostik regularly uses this product in their facility and receives shipments of the product often.
“The trailer is on fire as part of the scenario. So real world, you would see a gigantic ball of fire and a big plume of smoke, and this one is hard to simulate that, but the actual hazard to this is extremely high,” McCrea said.
For roughly 10 minutes, Ashland fire personnel shot water at the trailer, as they would if it was truly on fire.
The trailer was also located next to large storage tanks, which in a real-life scenario, could present another hazard of chemical mixing if the tanks were to catch fire or be disrupted by the heat.
If a situation like this were to happen, McCrea said the public health impact would be nearby people inhaling toxic fumes and chemical runoff into water or soil.
So the fire personnel practiced using their gas detection monitors, and the EMA team practiced reverse 911 notification, which alerts people in a certain radius of the spill and urges them to evacuate if necessary.
All on-duty fire personnel attended the training, while off-duty personnel were at the station to handle any emergency calls.
“All of us are trained to a certain hazmat level and we’re all trained to be able to maintain certain hazmat certifications and be able to operate on hazmat scenes and different levels, whether it’s containment or rescue,” McCrea said.
EMA’s roles
There were EMA evaluators from six different counties, whose roles were to observe how various firefighters and police responded to the scenario.
After the event, they met to discuss their findings and prepare an after-action report, Director of Ashland County EMA Anne Strouth said.
“These types of trainings are critical because it helps us identify gaps where we could do better, but it also identifies our strengths,” Strouth said.
But the scenario was also practice for the EMA team. Scott Engelhardt is a specialist for Ashland County EMA. He said the amateur radio operators, a large volunteer group, has never been involved in the drill before.
“So, one thing we wanted to do, was to test their response time. 
And same thing with our CERT (Community Emergency Response Team): there’s 40 people in our CERT team, but we’ve never done a true, full-scale (scenario) like this when we had a chance to activate them,” Engelhardt said.
The EMA team also tested the amount of time it takes to set up the mobile command trailer.
Engelhardst said these drills are important because they are ‘testing our strategies, testing our plans. We don’t know what plan works if we don’t try it,” he said.
Jeff Hardman, Ashland County Commissioner candidate, was one of the amateur radio volunteers on the scene. His role was to evaluate the wind speed and direction, the amount of traffic, observation of smoke and more.
Hardman said that helps with EMA communication to other departments that are handling the situation.
“It’s basically a logistical support role as well as communications if the fire departments and the police departments are busy,” he said. “Their radios are swamped, they’re swamped.
“They can’t handle this peripheral communications, and that’s where we step in with our thousands of dollars of radio equipment.”
Strouth said there will be at least one more training this year with a different company that expressed interest in doing one.
