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#70: From firefighting to ammonia
94 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of The Accidental Safety Pro Podcast, our guest is Gary Smith, President and CEO of the Ammonia Safety Training Institute. Gary has a remarkably storied career and a fascinating rise to where he is today. This is our longest episode ever because we couldn't pack Gary's story into just an hour. You won't want to miss this one!
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Transcript
Introduction to Safety Experts
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded January 29th, 2021. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Gary Smith, President and CEO of the Ammonia Safety Training Institute. Gary joins us today from his home near Santa Cruz, California. Welcome to the show, Gary. Thank you, Jill. It's a pleasure.
00:00:36
Speaker
Well, I cannot wait to ask you like so many questions about ammonia and PSM and all these things that vex so many people, but gosh, before we get there, I can't wait to hear your story about how is it that you became an expert in, in this particular field. Cause I'm guessing you just didn't jump in with both feet somewhere from somewhere.
00:01:02
Speaker
Well, jumping in with both feet, it does play into the story. Oh, really? OK. So we'll go back to the early days. I actually started in the fire service for the city of Davis as a firefighter in 1970. And I was only 19 at that time. And so it was an opportunity to be a volunteer and go to college. So I was kind of a resident volunteer.
00:01:32
Speaker
In my background, I came from a small town in Northern California called Fort Bragg up in Mendocito County, which is along the Northern coastline. And it was pretty isolated from everything. So I didn't even know what a college looked like until I went and was there at Davis and I was attending Sac
US Fire Safety Evolution
00:01:50
Speaker
State. So anyhow, the bottom line of all of that is I had
00:01:56
Speaker
in my earlier years had a fear of the fire department, because we lived up the street from the fire station and it was all volunteer. And when there was a call, the whistles would go off and the sirens would go off. And as a little guy, it scared the crap out of me. And they would pound the street as they drove by and nothing to do with that. And so as the years went by,
00:02:25
Speaker
I wasn't a big follower until college days and got an opportunity to get a free place to stay and volunteer to help. And then I realized, oh, this is a profession. And it's not all volunteer. And in the mid 70s is when things started to change in the fire service. We had the absolute worst
00:02:50
Speaker
record of fire loss as compared to any other industrialized country in the world. We had more deaths, more losses by far. President Nixon at the time decided that that was unacceptable and he formed a commission. They did a report called America Burning. In that report, they identified
00:03:18
Speaker
you know, that the lack of training, that we had very poor personal protective equipment, you know, as canvas turnouts and leather or fiberglass helmets that really weren't, you know, they covered your head. But I mean, as far as safety goes, we had breathing apparatus, but there was one of them in a suitcase that sat on the fire engine.
00:03:46
Speaker
if anybody dared use it, you'd be declared a sissy. And the chief always said, as long as he could stand in the doorway, just hug the nozzle and go after the fire and don't worry about putting on any breathing apparatus. And so it was like an era of kind of, actually there was a sense of pride of telling people that, in a general sense,
00:04:15
Speaker
You were a firefighter and that was the number one most dangerous occupation in the world. And I feel silly about it now because what a thing to brag about. And fortunately, because of America burning, the training programs improved. The personal protective equipment improved.
00:04:36
Speaker
the staffing levels and the way we went about fighting fire improved. And to make a long story short, we cut the fire losses and we, as the whole fire service, using the background of what happened with America burning, cut the life loss in half. And we've sustained that ever since because things like smoke detectors and residential sprinklers
00:05:06
Speaker
a lot of other, you know, fire prevention efforts. I mean, we, we never did inspections or any of those other things. And all of a sudden we had a, you know, an aggressive fire prevention program. So I witnessed that and I grew through that and I learned from that. And so that's, that's what really kind of was the beginning of actually going from a
00:05:32
Speaker
pretty wild and crazy kid who did a lot of stuff in the teenage years that I probably shouldn't have. I got away with not becoming a victimize me and or my friends that we were together doing things that we shouldn't have been.
Gary's Career in Fire Service
00:05:50
Speaker
And so it was a careless lifestyle. And then all of a sudden, coming into an occupation, it was
00:05:58
Speaker
basically the same thing, it was careless and dangerous. And then seeing how it got turned around in what we did in prevention and mitigation and preparation and training and good equipment and a professional attitude. And now the pride is that we can't battle
00:06:25
Speaker
situations that are very dangerous and do it effectively because we're properly prepared to mitigate and handle that. I was mowing the lawn at the fire station one Saturday, which was a part of our Saturday routine. Firefighting is not all fun and games, running calls and having
00:06:50
Speaker
you know, all that excitement. There's a lot of that kind of work that goes on, you know, just maintaining the house and the station equipment and all that stuff. And, and I was thinking, do I want to really make the rest of my career? I love the job, but do I really want to just keep doing this? And, um, I've always had that kind of, uh, something inside me that says, you know, leading an organization or being able to,
00:07:17
Speaker
take on the challenges and accomplish things that I watched happen with America burning. And in my college life, I went to major in fire administration and I got a bachelor's degree and I started teaching. And so different things like that just inspired me, said, hey, let's move on. And I was lucky enough to get promoted
00:07:44
Speaker
through the captain slot and then as a fire marshal in a community down south in Stockton area, a place called Manteca. And there was the first fire marshal they ever had. And so I, again, working with the firefighters and getting them out, doing programs and trainings with the schools and doing inspections and kind of, you know, this is the era of hazardous materials.
00:08:12
Speaker
you know, where it was in the late 70s where all of a sudden the wash down era, because that's what we did with anything that was ugly or unwanted is just washed it away, down the gutters. And we didn't even have any idea where it went after that. And in most cases, you know, it went into waterways and environment. And, you know, it got to the point where, you know,
00:08:41
Speaker
The pollution factor was getting so bad in the San Francisco Bay Area, nothing was living. It was just absolutely pathetic. And thank God for EPA and the move that began in the late 70s and hazardous materials started to turn from things that just happened and just deal with them to a managed program. So there's another opportunity to see a transition and be a part of that.
00:09:10
Speaker
What an interesting journey you've been on, Gary. I mean, I'm thinking about, you know, you started with the fire service where essentially it's the Wild West, right? And then you have this pivot with America burning. And you were really young at the time where we might, you know, hindsight being what it is and we're older adults now.
00:09:34
Speaker
Um, you know, you were in that adrenaline piece of an invincibility, right? When you, you started, you started that way and then, and then there's this shift. And so did that.
00:09:46
Speaker
Did that shift kind of follow you as you were just maturing as an adult as well, where it seemed like, oh yeah, this makes sense now that I really want to put on this as CBA and I want to protect myself?
Leadership in Fire Safety
00:10:02
Speaker
Did that journey, did it follow your maturity as well? Because it feels like it. It did. But there's a lot of
00:10:12
Speaker
factors that are happening around you and I would speak to more to the younger audience and Where where you are doing things because you instinctively think they're the right things to do and sometimes they're not And sometimes they are but you're very much influenced by those you're hanging around with and those who have their beliefs that you know, they you know that they live and you kind of follow that and I had the good fortune to
00:10:41
Speaker
work with people who had been through their younger years and were developing professionalism. One captain I worked for, where the transition with the breathing apparatus really came true, it was kind of, what do they call it? A significant emotional event that kind of is a trigger point for a change. We had a fire in a restaurant and one of the volunteer chiefs,
00:11:07
Speaker
Who was a good man? He's electrician very sharp, but he was his his career was built around Pull the hose line in and get next to it if you want, you know some air because you can get some at least a whiff or two and go for the fire and Heck with this breathing apparatus stuff. Well, the captain I worked for had already gotten past that and you know, I have to say that in some regards it was because we were becoming unionized to that
00:11:34
Speaker
And I don't mean to politicize the discussion here, but the union did do a lot for us in our ability to set up and negotiate and to really take the problems that we were having and deal with them. And the younger group of leaders, they were buying into that. And I worked for a young captain and he stopped that chief and told me to
00:11:58
Speaker
He was heading and he pulled the line out of my hand. I was just putting my regulator hose on into the regulator and I was ready to go in, but he just grabbed it and took off and he says, pull them out. I said, really? Yeah, pull them out. So, okay. I grabbed him by the legs and pulled him back out of there. And man, talk about an upset person. He was.
00:12:20
Speaker
He was livid, but the captain said, I'll take it and go for it with the fire. And he pulled the guy out. And then I, you know, we went in and we put it out and we didn't, you know, it was a smoky, dangerous fire, but we jumped on it small and it went out. And when it came back out, now what's gonna happen? Well, this electrician was also a great leader. He was just from a different era.
00:12:47
Speaker
And that experience for him, when he had the bottom line, what he was doing and what he saw that I could do with the breathing apparatus and the whole story came clear, he was man enough to stand up with and say, you know, you guys are right. And at that moment we won, you know, the chief over as well with regards to the era has to change. And so together we did that.
00:13:17
Speaker
Um, and you know, maybe our country needs to learn a little bit more about that too, is it's a give and take. And when leaders know there's something right to be done and they stand up to it, even though they know they're going to catch crap. Um, you know, if it's for the cause that they, that, that benefits everybody, they, you do it. And so watching that and being a part of that, what happens, it doesn't say like all of a sudden, you know, tomorrow, now I'm a whole different man.
00:13:47
Speaker
It was more like shaping my judgment. Right. It's the whole thing about when we know better, we do better. That's right. That's exactly right. And we have to kind of... I think the more we abide by that instinct of interest to do the right thing, the more you want to do the right thing because you know good things happen. And when you watch others that don't, they might have a
00:14:17
Speaker
an exciting moment, but in the long run, they lose if they don't take things on and do what's appropriately safe and effective. And when it isn't conducive to what you're really trying to achieve, you figure out ways to make it safe and conducive. And that's kind of how the next phase of my life went with the hazardous materials.
Ammonia Safety Challenges
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, so you went from the wash down and then the realization that that's not good. Yeah. Yeah. Next shift. We were getting into some pretty ugly stuff like malathion and such like that with, you know, we were in Davis is surrounded by agriculture and a lot of situations where, you know, they do aircraft, you know, the crop dusting and some of this with pesticides at that time.
00:15:10
Speaker
Malathian, you get it on your skin and it doesn't take much and you're gone. And so that was waking us all up. But then as a fire marshal had more responsibility and in Manteca, the electronics industry, we were right across the hill from the Santa Clara, the Silicon Valley and the electronics facilities were building up quite rapidly. And they were using a lot of
00:15:37
Speaker
Oh, we used to call them methyl ethyl bad stuff. I'll leave off. The ketone part? Yeah. Okay. Methyl ethyl bad stuff. Yeah. We knew that it was something we didn't want to get around, but we weren't chemists, you know? And so as a fire marshal, I had a part of the code though that I could use when they came to town is I could hire consultants and they had to pay the tab to teach us.
00:16:05
Speaker
what are we looking for here and what do we need to do when they deal with some of the chemicals that they're dealing with and set up to mitigate as much as we can so that they can go into business and do it safely. So that was a good learning experience and the whole logic of prevention and mitigation started to come into play.
00:16:28
Speaker
And then we started organizing our efforts to also be ready to respond. One kind of funny story. I mean, we were getting to the point where the underground fuel tanks were really in our, you know, as a city, we handled all of that and it was getting, the tanks at that time were not double contained nor monitored. And so the leaks would go into the ground and many times into the water system and contamination factor was really getting very ugly.
00:16:59
Speaker
In fact, in a neighboring city, the city of Tracy, I remember they had one day a traffic signal just blew up. And they said, what the heck would a traffic signal blow up? Did somebody shoot it or what? And it turned out that the gas vapors had gotten because the plume had spread so much, had gotten into the conduit. And when the light switched from one color to the next, it ignited it. And that's how bad the
00:17:27
Speaker
underground the underground leaks were doing so, you know, we had to all the gas stations around you had to you know pull the tanks and put new tanks in and you know, make sure that they work properly and and then the whole hazardous materials management planning was beginning and
00:17:43
Speaker
and a lot of controversy with industry because it was a major change. Most of them, they had what they called care. It was a community awareness and emergency response, but it was more in line with, in those days, more of a voluntary effort that the Chemical Manufacturers Association bought into. So they were very helpful. And so that was my first encounter with
00:18:13
Speaker
government, industry, and public safety kind of coming together to do something. Now it wasn't all roses because sometimes, depending on what the issue was and who we're dealing with, there was a lot of conflict. And it wasn't all that industry was being defensive. We were all over the page with regards to different jurisdictions and there's a whole bunch of stuff going on with enforcing even the federal codes with
00:18:41
Speaker
Epcra and and and you know the the different the different things that were going on with cleanup and and Readiness for dealing with managing hazardous materials. Sure. So jurisdiction is a thing. Yeah And in fact when the Clean Air Act was passed that they put a clause in it that said Within five years it had to be evaluated and and into that valuation
00:19:10
Speaker
They were to check out to see how things were going as far as what the Congressional Act was all about with Sarah and then how it was playing out regulation-wise. Well, EPA was the lead for that, and they brought in local, state, and federal agencies and industrial players as well, and kind of like the America burning story, except this one was all about chemical, hazardous materials.
00:19:40
Speaker
when they brought the commission together, I met with the chair of the group. He was EPA region manager in Houston for the Texas region, which I think is region three or whatever. But anyhow, Jim Stavis, what great guy. And he was a natural leader on top of being
00:20:03
Speaker
They're very sharp on chemicals because, you know, the Houston, especially the harbor there, that's the hotbed of all chemicals. I mean, a lot of experience there. And they had in their organization in EPA, they had an industrial liaison, and they really worked closely together. The liaison was the buffer between, you know, the two. And because of their connection, they made a lot of progress on everything.
00:20:28
Speaker
And all of a sudden I started seeing in a general sense, and I didn't have this written out because again, as you mature, you experience, you get into a situation where you just absorb these things and all of a sudden you're doing them. Well, anyhow, this vision came to me as a tripod relationship between industry, government, and public safety. Now industry holds the hazards.
00:20:56
Speaker
And, um, you know, we always talked about hazards, risks and threats, right. And depending on who, who was talking and when you were, what you were saying, you would use the term kind of intermixed intermixed. Sometimes hazards would be risks and risks would be threats and threats would be hazard. I mean, for me, it was like all over the place. I mean, we just use the word and, uh, you know, kind of carelessly. Then I started really looking at it, especially with the, you know, the experience and then the,
00:21:25
Speaker
and working with other professionals and said, well, let's define this a little better. What's the difference between hazards, risks and threats? And now it's come clear and that hazards is what, that's what we live with day to day. I mean, just look around, you can spot hazards right in your workplace. Electrical hazards, you got tripping hazards, you got all those things. So hazards exist.
00:21:54
Speaker
And you've got to recognize them. You've got to understand them. You've got to know that they're there. And the more you know about what they're all about, just like with my early days with Fighting Fire, if you know what it's all about, then you know what to do when you have to address the challenges that would occur. And so you do that because you assess the risks. Now risks are not in your face.
00:22:23
Speaker
can happen if things go wrong. If that hazard is mismanaged and it escapes containment and it becomes real, there's a risk factor that says you could have done things to either detected that it was happening soon and addressed it before it materialized to be anything dangerous, or that you're prepared, if it does happen, to deal with it and
00:22:51
Speaker
and manage it and bring it back into scope because you have personal protective equipment and knowledge about how to contain and control it. So risks kind of set the stage. Threats are the things that are in your face. Threats are like, okay, now it's happened.
00:23:09
Speaker
And now you either mitigate it and deal with it and stop it small or start watching for the escalating factors because it could quickly become catastrophic. And so when you look at that in the big picture as a fire chief and as a manager of emergency manager, kind of an attitude, you're always looking at things with that understanding, beginning with the fact that the hazard exists
00:23:37
Speaker
We've done what we can in a risk management approach to not only prevent it, but prepare so that if a threat does happen, we're ready to engage mitigations to bring it back into safe. And doing that is, we coined a phrase early on with the Ammonia Institute, we call it prevent them all or stop them small.
00:24:06
Speaker
And that logic has worked well for us because when they finished with their clean air assessment, they realized that this team realized that it's a mess out there. At that point,
00:24:32
Speaker
or even in the early 80s in the early 90s as well, the instant command system was very popular and used a lot in some departments. And in other departments, they had their own system or in many, they had no system. They just did things the way they did them. And law enforcement and fire were really on separate tracks.
00:25:01
Speaker
using combined incident command system logic as they are today. And so that was just one example, but the pieces were all over the place. There was overlap. There were conflicting regulations. There were conflicting approaches. And somebody in that group said,
00:25:25
Speaker
And, you know, cause I'd interviewed a number of them that were there. They said, why can't we just have one plan? Yeah, right. Just one plan, you know, bring it all together with one plan. And, and they said, ah, good idea. One plan. Let's, let's, you know, it's an integrated contingency plan is what the formal name happened, but the one plan picked up and it, with the one plan, it was like, okay, let's, you know, it's,
Ammonia in Agriculture
00:25:53
Speaker
It's, it really groups in everything from the, you know, the hazardous risks and threats logic. I call them HRTs. They brought them all together and said, you know, we have to deal with the, you know, preventative measures, the risk management and measures and the response measures. And so when it comes to that response measure, there's, there's really four phases to an emergency as you discover it.
00:26:22
Speaker
And when you discover it, that means you hopefully had detection and you picked it up early. And then you've gone through the process and have trained well enough because discovery usually always happens with the industry because they do the day-to-day. They have the hazards, they have the risks, they have the threats. Yeah, it's the birthplace of it. Yeah, yeah. It's where it's all going to start. And if they got their act together,
00:26:50
Speaker
They take process safety and risk management seriously. So they're ready in that discovery phase to jump on it and stop it small. And then they make the calls early. They get the 911 support. The support that they get has been, they've trained together. They know enough about how to handle the scenarios that they have in their plant. And they do what they can together to
00:27:18
Speaker
to stop that. Now I'm painting the rosius of pictures because believe me, I've seen chaos and a lot of really dysfunctional work happening in the first 30 minutes of just about every emergency I've ever responded to. And getting a hold of that and managing that is many times getting chaos under control is to move the people that are creating the chaos out of harm's way and then start to figure it out, which is it takes a lot of time.
00:27:48
Speaker
It's much better if you have a previously developed relationship where when you get on the scene, you know, you get a CAN report and it's a simple logic. CAN is conditions, starts with conditions. What's happening? What do you got? Actions. What have you done so far? You know, where are you with it now? And then what do you need from us? The end. What do you need from us?
00:28:12
Speaker
conditions, actions, and needs. And then if you have a basic site map and a basic checklist of how your emergency system control plan and the things that go into what you want to do right off the bat and you're in sync, then the fire department and the industry industrial members that know their systems, they work together and they address the challenges and stop the problems when they're small. Now,
00:28:41
Speaker
The challenge goes back to how do you get that perfect world into shape, moving from chaos and really 90 plus percent of the calls were not going well. And to do it quickly. I mean, the faster that you can get that chaos under control, the greater your success. That's right. That's right.
00:29:08
Speaker
And so I guess this is about the time that when it really came to recognizing this more than any other time was this is about the time I was offered the job as fire chief in Watsonville. Watsonville sits near the Salinas Valley. We are in the Pajaro Valley. And it's like the fruit and vegetable source for
00:29:36
Speaker
the nation and actually all over the world. Strawberries and apples and lettuce and broccoli and all kinds of different things that are grown in the Salinas Valley and the Parla Valley go all over the world. And the industry, if you ever wanted to do a really good podcast, talking to how the industry handles fresh vegetables and keeps them that way, it has a lot to do with the way they use ammonium refrigeration.
00:30:06
Speaker
And the fact that we are growing such an abundance of food has a lot to do with the fact that we use ammonia as a fertilizer. In fact, ammonia has been credited for saving a third of the world's population from starvation because we can fertilize the soils and continue to do that in a way that the crops sustain and we go forward.
00:30:35
Speaker
And if you watch the process, they take lettuce off the field. They used to ice it and put it on rail cars and ship it across the country. And if everything went well, by the time it got to the East Coast, it had still enough life in it that they could sell it. But in many cases, they had to dump a lot of it because they would lose it in transit because it couldn't
00:31:05
Speaker
keep it fresh. So, you know, they figured it out and they have these units, they call them hydrovax. When the, when the, when the lettuce comes off the field and they harvest in the morning, they have these huge forklifts that handle about 20 pallets of product boxes up. It's like, it's like 20 foot wide, 30 foot wide, and about 10 foot high.
00:31:33
Speaker
And they put it up on this rail and it rolls into this like a big railroad car. It's a huge metal. And they cool that lettuce down to one degree above freezing, which puts the lettuce to sleep. And it does no damage to it, but it keeps it fresh. When they've got it at that temperature, they put it in the warehouse at that temperature and they hold on to it and start shipping.
00:32:00
Speaker
And their marketing teams are working constantly where all this lettuce goes. And they have developed methods of getting it to all over the country. And when it's put out for people to buy, it's as fresh there as it is when we go down where it's just been picked here and pick it up at the same store. So the vegetable market has been really, for many years, it developed around
00:32:30
Speaker
factor that you use ammonia. Yeah, so this is where ammonia enters your life, is through agriculture and because of your job and where it was situated as a fire marshal. Yeah. Interesting. And it was, you know, I went from electronics over in Manteca and the beginning of understanding about ammonia, in fact,
00:32:57
Speaker
you know, the team got, you know, started to, you know, pick up the, you know, the message about no longer doing wash downs and things like that. And one quick story that was kind of funny. It was like, uh, we, we had formed our hazmat team and, um, you know, it was more, uh, we had to pick up with some gear and we had people that were trained a little bit above everybody else. A lot of the training that we have now, it wasn't even available then. And, but we were, we were more conscientious anyhow, uh,
00:33:24
Speaker
We got a call and an engine went out one day and they said, yeah, there was a big truck here and earlier this morning, it's gone now, but there's this kind of milky looking substance in the gutter that leaked out of the truck and going, oh. So they called it as a hazmat and they didn't wash it down this time. We had to go look at it. We had to figure out what it was. There was no odor or anything.
00:33:53
Speaker
We're looking at it and we're trying to figure out what could have been here and all of a sudden I see this dog go over and start lapping it up.
00:34:04
Speaker
that's different and we've got the looking at it and it was milk. Is this when we started putting those placards with the real seal on them? Is this where this entered into the story? That's what it should have been because of course we had dairies all over the place and we all went duh geez you know and
00:34:25
Speaker
So when you know it, the newspaper was there as we were going through all those moves. And the headline for the day was, fire department cries over spilled milk. Well, that's good. So anyhow, yeah, there was those eras that we went through. But I really wanted to get back to the coast. And I had an opportunity to test for the fire chief's job.
00:34:54
Speaker
in Watsonville, it's right on the ocean. It's in the Carmel, you know, Santa Cruz area, Monterey Bay area. And, you know, so anyhow, I was lucky enough to get it, get the job. I was only 36 years old at that point, but, you know, having started at 19, I had a fair number of years under my belt and done enough things with regards to, you know, the variety of jobs that I had been doing that they decided to go
00:35:23
Speaker
with me as their fire chief. And so they had, and Manteca, and actually in Davis too, I think we had one ammonia user in both of those communities. One cold storage facility in Manteca, and we had another one in Davis. So all I remember from ammonia is there's
00:35:44
Speaker
It's noisy, they got compressors, they got pipes, they got tanks, they got ammonia, which had no knowledge about this, you know, on the specifics, except it's gotta be hazardous material. And you smell it, it smells, you know, smells so terrible. It's like, it's gotta be ugly. And so, like at Watsonville, there was 25 cold storage facilities, because again, being as big as they were
00:36:12
Speaker
in food processing and the fact that when, generally speaking, when a cold storage operation sets up, you've got all the infrastructure behind that you got to put into play. People who do the repairs on the system and the marketing and the shipping and you have routes that have been developed around that. And so it goes to reason that a group of them will locate close to each other because
00:36:42
Speaker
You know, it just works out in a better way for the big pitcher. So anyhow, that was over a million pounds of ammonia and we had it all over the place. And so I thought, whoa, okay. And I was in my first year and all of a sudden one day the alarm goes off and it came in as a power pole transformer that was arc flashing. That's a single engine response and they went on it.
00:37:11
Speaker
I just kept working and then they called for a second alarm and it was ammonia release and fire.
Collaboration for Safety
00:37:18
Speaker
So, okay, now we're talking and get to the scene. And the transformer was arc flashing. It started in the engine room with just a circuit breaker box. And to cut to the quick, what had happened is a breaker, it was 80 degrees in Watsonville, which is on the coast,
00:37:40
Speaker
is like 100 degrees other places, it gets really warm. And a fresh load of peaches that just come in from the valley and an old refrigeration system and the engine room was not the compressor room, I should say. They always called it engine rooms, but it's actually a compressor room. But they had old equipment and an electrical that had been given them problems. And rather than fix the circuitry and they just, you know,
00:38:09
Speaker
do as many times, they just reset or do whatever else they can do to kind of keep things going. Well, on that day, that arc flash just blew that whole panel. And then it kept arc flashing, it wouldn't stop. And it would, you know, the fire started in the engine room. When I got there, I remember that was happening there, you could hear it go off, you know, and you could see the sparks and
00:38:31
Speaker
we couldn't attack it because it was still alive and Assel can get the power shut down on this. And they had no idea about how to cut it because all the circuitry was in where the fire was. So we had the utility company coming and then all of a sudden their main transformer outside started doing the same thing. And it was really big. I mean, big arc flash, white fire bouncing all over the place
00:38:58
Speaker
Holy crap, you know, this is my first experience on a even anything to do with it cold storage and here we had you know, these things going so I turned to my assistant chief and And I say so what's what's gonna happen with the ammonia fire? Yeah, we could handle that but the ammonia was like a new one and he says I don't know and I said you know, we knew we had a problem with a with a
00:39:26
Speaker
with the arc flash, but how, you know, what's that going to do with regards to what, when it, you know, that ammonia heats up? Are we looking at potential for blevee? Are we looking at, you know, and no, it was just blank stares and including the engineer for the plant. And by that time, there was four or five other engineers that had come, you know, those that work on systems and such. And I, you know, nobody had any, any feedback. And I didn't have time just to kind of go interview each one of them.
00:39:56
Speaker
the incident was unfolding and there we were right in front of the dang thing. So anyhow, finally the power company went, they had to go around and they had to pull pole fuses and they had to go all the way around the block because the plant was being fed by power from two different directions and nobody knew that. So finally they did get the power out and we attacked the fire and we got in there and put it out and everybody thought, wow,
00:40:27
Speaker
The cold storage part, there was a firewall in between, which I didn't, I asked about, but nobody knew anything that I wanted to know if the fire would penetrate and go on through, but it didn't. And so we held it there and put it out. And I remember going back to the station and thinking, you know, everybody was really happy that we were doing that. And I heard, you know, people say, yeah, the Watsonville Fire Department, man, these guys know how to
00:40:56
Speaker
take care of problems. And you're like, no, I don't. No, that's right. I got lucky. I had a few more explicitives in my mind about what the hell was going on. Nobody knew anything. And so I'm thinking like, well, now where do we go?
00:41:16
Speaker
And then I get back, it was not, but a day or two later and I get the fire engineering magazine and I open it up and a headline on it was a firefighter killed in Shreveport in an ammonia refrigeration incident. I go, what? And I'm reading through it and I says that the ammonia flashed and caught them. They were wearing butyl rubber entry suits, level A suits. And when it flashed, it caught their suits on fire.
00:41:45
Speaker
And Percy Johnson died and a young man, you know, just young kids and a family, he couldn't get out. And Pat, you know, he was a little bit more senior and knew a little bit more about, you know, he tried to get Percy to follow him, but it was so, he was, Percy was in worse shape and couldn't keep up with him. And they, he got out, but he got really bad, serious third degree burns.
00:42:11
Speaker
and actually died on the scene several times with what was revived. He had a heart cardiac issue. So anyhow, he survived. And this had just happened a month before. So I called Shreveport Fire and I got ahold of the training chief and I told him the story and I said, and this, we were made arrangements. We kept in touch and about six months later, Pat,
00:42:41
Speaker
was able to travel and he actually came out. We paid for him to come visit and we needed to learn more about that. And meanwhile, like I said before, it was time to turn to industry. And the chemical supplier was Hill Brothers Chemical. And Hill Brothers was one of those care type facilities. Doug Hill,
00:43:08
Speaker
was a big kind of an early supporter of building that care logic. He felt, if I'm going to sell these chemicals, I want to make sure that people use them safely. And he had a heartfelt passion for that. And they had just finished, at that same time, a big release that happened in San Jose, a rail car pull away where the rail company actually pulled a car out that was still being hooked up and used.
00:43:38
Speaker
And when they pulled it away, they broke the line and they had a terrible problem going on as far as controlling that. And it didn't go well. And ours didn't go well. And then we met up with an engineering group. And it's called the Refrigerating Engineers and Technicians Association. And Rita, for short, and they had
00:44:07
Speaker
people that understood systems inside and out. But they didn't have any background on this fire issue. And they thought it was like ammonia won't burn. And they said, if anything, there's oil, compressor oil, maybe that would burn, but the ammonia won't burn. And I said, well,
00:44:33
Speaker
It did, you know, you can't say it didn't because one guy, one firefighters dead, another one seriously burned and it was the ammonia, it was a refrigerant. And so they actually locally started to understand, you know, you're right, something is wrong here and we're not gonna fight you on the idea, we just need to understand why. And I said, yeah, that's right. That's where we need to go is understand why.
00:45:00
Speaker
And then, go ahead, no. I'm just piecing this together that by way of circumstance, you took yourself to school and you created the school with the industry partners and your own background and knowledge to build your own expertise.
00:45:19
Speaker
because you didn't necessarily have a choice. You know? That's right. Yeah. And, you know, I want to say before I lose that opportunity, because you just triggered a really important fact about this whole story. Is this, you know, while I'm telling it and I was in the center of a lot of it, we wouldn't have gotten anywhere if I didn't have a good team. I had people who I didn't have to convince
00:45:47
Speaker
that we needed to study it. They were right there with me. And in fact, we only met the Refrigeration Engineers and Technicians Association because of a firefighter that was one of our hazmat techs that we had trained. And he had heard of them and he attended a session they had in, I think it was a Gilroy or something. He said, these guys are, these guys really know ammonia. And I said, well, perfect. You know, invite them over. Let's meet.
00:46:12
Speaker
And they brought Doug with them and we had a meeting and it was, you know, when you have chapter changing moments, just like pulling that chief out of the, you know, the fire that time and all those things that happened, they're like significant emotional events. And that was meeting Doug Hill and the team that came that day that really kind of gave us a lesson
00:46:42
Speaker
on refrigeration and listened to our concerns about what we just went through was fantastic. You know, we then started working together and they were having an annual conference in the near future that they said, would I speak at? And I said, well, geez, I'm just fresh and as I don't,
00:47:06
Speaker
You're just getting to know. Yeah, I don't know what they could talk about. And they said, well, that's all right, because we've asked, I think, the six or eight different fire chiefs about talking about it. And none of them want to do it for the same reason. We don't know why we can't talk about something we don't really even understand. And I said, OK, well, it's time to do the homework then. And well, well, you know, I'll do it. And it was the best thing I ever did because
00:47:35
Speaker
Now the team was exposed to a higher level of knowledge about ammonia in the system. We learned about why that arc flash didn't stop. Because arc flash, a lot of times, and this happens with wires down sometimes too, where it'll hit the ground and it'll arc flash and the power company sometimes sends another charge through because it's thinking that a branch might've hit a wire or something and it wants to clear.
00:48:05
Speaker
So that's one reason why it'll jump back up again. But when it's in a circuit breaker panel where it's so close, when the poles are close enough, there's a gas that goes from one pole to the other. And it's like an arc welder operates. And so when it comes pole to pole, it'll flash again. And that's what was happening is that until they cut the power off at the power pole, that gas was arc flashing and it just kept doing it.
00:48:35
Speaker
And I'm saying for like 15, 20 minutes before they finally got to the poll that cut it off. So those are the kinds of things we started learning and sharing knowledge on. And we got a lot more on the ball with regards to how to deal with these issues. And just to kind of bring it along, we started locally bringing in, we created a plan
00:49:05
Speaker
where we would bring in all the facilities, all 25, and they would bring in their people. And we had a nice training tower and a trick classroom and things like that. And we would have regular meetings where we learned and plan together. And part of it was, I mean, we hadn't really gotten, our emphasis in the early days of this hazmat stuff was to build hazmat teams, get equipment,
00:49:34
Speaker
There was grants available. We, you know, we were able to do a lot of stuff that, you know, they could pick up the physical side and the training. And it was all geared around, you know, we'd have a team that would be able to go out and, you know, be able to deal with these ammonia releases and, you know, that would be a big solution. And we would work cooperatively and make it happen.
00:50:03
Speaker
And you know, that worked, but that wasn't really the answer. That was what it became in some respects. And the bigger picture, it became a part of our history, if you look at Hazmat development, where we kind of went forwards and then fell backwards a couple steps. Going forward was building the teams and that was good. And they,
00:50:31
Speaker
have sustained and they're very valuable, these hazmat teams. But to depend on them for all four phases of response is a big mistake because what happened is in the early days and the whole hazmat rules really started to pick up with OSHA being more involved with mandated trainings and PPE requirements and EPA the same.
00:51:00
Speaker
Um, is, is, you know, they said, well, shoot, level a all the way. That's, that's, that's the solution. So what does that cause to happen? It, it says, Oh, okay. So if we have a ammonia release or anything chemical, we just call the hazmat team.
00:51:21
Speaker
And how long does that take to get a hazmat team operational? Right, and not every community is going to have that. In some cases, it's hours away. Right. And even in metro areas, to set up a hazmat team to engage, if you can do it in 30 minutes, you're darn good. And I've done now, after the years have gone by, I've been in most every metropolitan area that
00:51:51
Speaker
that exists in US and a lot in Canada and South America and Australia and Poland and all over the world. And it's just the same thing. I mean, it's, you know, the Hazmat team has a purpose. It's a tool and it's a great tool, but you know where the gap was? It's in the first 30 minutes.
International Safety Influence
00:52:13
Speaker
That's when, you know, in discovery and in that initial response, there's two things that are critical.
00:52:20
Speaker
Number one is people are now still close to the problem. They haven't fully evacuated. Some of them may be trapped. You know, the incident is initial, usually smaller, but it's growing. And what happened with the regulations is they got so tight that they set up ideal H, immediately dangerous to life and health factors for every chemical.
00:52:47
Speaker
Well, that becomes such a gospel, such a line in the sand that from a prescriptive side of requirements, you can't do anything unless you've got technician trained and proper PPE and this level A all the way logic was in play. And so a whole culture got developed around delaying anything happening for the first 30 minutes instead of really having
00:53:13
Speaker
performance-related experiences and trained incident commanders who knew how far they could go with a given chemical, especially when you have 25 pole storage facilities and as much background we had on ammonia, 300 parts per million, we knew was, well, even by the standard, that's survivable for 30 minutes with nothing, no training. It's for the general public, young, old, and otherwise.
00:53:41
Speaker
Why are we now prohibited from engaging emergency shutdown logic or system controls and dealing with the problem to try to stop it when it's small and a performance basis? But no, you're cited if you do anything. In fact, there's a fire chief we're working with now. There's several of them up in Oregon and Washington. They were cited.
00:54:06
Speaker
even though they had Level A, but because the monitor that they had was not working to be able to judge the atmosphere for what it was, but they could see and know it was at the phase that they could go in and shut it off with Level A. They had enough training and knowledge and background to do that, but because they did that and the OSHA inspector happened to be watching them, they got a
00:54:33
Speaker
a very heavy fine put on them because they didn't monitor it because it was over IDLH. So there's things like that are happening that really then makes for, it just gets out of sync. It's not right. So that's what we have to straighten out.
00:54:51
Speaker
Yeah, so it's still a work in progress. I wanted to ask, as you were kind of describing some of the progression of how some of these rules came about from establishing hazmat teams and incident command systems and EPA laws started to come around throughout your career, and you started to mention OSHA,
00:55:18
Speaker
Is that kind of when PSM or process safety management came in somewhere in this phase? Yes, it is. And I'm glad that you brought that up because I actually had two trips to Washington DC on this whole issue of the one plan and what we were trying to do with it. Because after I realized and our team all agreed
00:55:45
Speaker
that the first 30-minute was so valuable. That's when we built the 30-minute plan. It's a one-page checklist of four phases of response. It has discovery, initial response, and then sustained response, where you're now engaging to go into the hazard area and that you have to have certain information available to you to even do that safely, even if you're on level A. And then the fourth phase is termination and recovery, which anybody that works any
00:56:15
Speaker
kind of a emergency management role at all knows that many times that's the hardest and most long lasting and expensive phase is terminating and recovering and putting a plant back on his feet again. Many times they fail, they go under and everybody suffers. But the bottom line is in that first 30 minutes, we knew we had to adjust for performance related.
00:56:42
Speaker
risk assessment type of decisions that you have to have enough wisdom to be able to judge go no go. If I can see a victim and they're in a situation and there's still signs of life and I have turnouts and breathing apparatus and I can do a grab and go with the proper procedures and I know it's ammonia,
00:57:09
Speaker
And I know that that turnout, because of our, what we did is started training. We were lucky enough to get access to a training facility at Fort Ord. It was a military village training center. They call them a Mount, where they have, it's called the Impossible City. It's got a whole village of cement buildings, cement block buildings, a gas station, a plaza with some office buildings.
00:57:36
Speaker
a little residential area, it's really neat. And we were able to do ammonia releases and learn a lot about the dynamics of aerosol, vapor, and gas, and the movement of them, and how to contain them. Because of working with the associations, RITA, as I mentioned earlier, and then International Institute of Ammonia Refrigerations, it's called IIAR.
00:58:06
Speaker
as well as the International Association of Refrigerator Warehouses, global cold chain. These represented thousands of different facilities and they're very good professional development operations. And so anyhow, I got closer with them and we started working together and understanding a lot more of the dynamics of what we could do
00:58:34
Speaker
on dealing with that first 30 minutes so we could deal with critical tasks. Rescue and getting people out of harm's way, containing the release. I went to Sweden with a friend that I met in IAR. His name was Anders Lindborg. He was known worldwide as the king of the ammonia industry. I mean, because he was so sharp. He was a big Swede and he had a loud voice, especially when
00:59:03
Speaker
when people challenged on and coming out with some crazy ideas, he would put them back into their place real quick because he was so wise. And he became a personal friend and family friends. And we spent a lot of time together. And part of what he brought me over and showed me with a group called HydroCare, how the tarp and cover logic work, how you could throw a tarp over an aerosol and knock the aerosol down
00:59:30
Speaker
and keep that aerosol from driving out and making a large plume in the distance affecting a big population where you could actually hold it in a much smaller area by just containing it. And then the Hazmat team could come in with proper PPE to actually get inside and control it and deal with it in its final phases.
00:59:53
Speaker
Fascinating. And how to use fans properly you know and then you know the upside and downside of water because you know we're tradition bound to put water on everything and when you put it on ammonia especially we put on liquid or aerosol it what it does is that it mixes so ammonia and water love each other and and and they you know you mix a good solution and you're you're getting up in 20-30 percent ranges and you could have
01:00:21
Speaker
The ammonia vapor cloud is going to be just as bad as it is if you left it alone because it still evaporates. And when it evaporates, it's got a pH factor of over 11. And so it's going to burn, it's going to stay low, it's going to be a lot of, you know, it's a bigger problem. But there's other times when water works really good to buffer and allow for, you know, a quick entry or knock down a cloud to see a valve and shut it off or, you know, those kinds of things.
01:00:51
Speaker
Learning that and then training it is how we evolved. And part of it was that I figured that if we had a checklist and playbooks for those four phases of response, we could actually capture facility-related data and put it in a format that was simple to use. Pictures and maps and checklist details that would say,
01:01:20
Speaker
how you would handle each one of those phases. And that they would become more self-sufficient themselves because what industry started doing is when OSHA started cranking on all the requirements that they gave up on breathing apparatus and hazmat teams of their own, it would just cost them too much and it was too hard to sustain it.
01:01:43
Speaker
based on the fact that they, you know, a plant, you know, you might go 20 years and never have a single incident that has got any threat to it. And then tomorrow it's, you know, you got it incident that goes catastrophic because nobody does anything until the hazmat team gets there. So it's the ammonia is left to do what it's going to do. And, um, you know, it grows into a big incident. So I went to Washington and in, um,
01:02:11
Speaker
It was when Fujishima, the second time was when Fujishima had just happened and down the hall, the EOC and EPA was open and they were working the Fujishima and we were in the conference room and we had the Chemical Safety Board, US Fire Administration, DOT, a lot of the players who were working together on the original one plan team and Jim Staves who was the chair, which was wonderful.
Ammonia in Green Energy
01:02:39
Speaker
And so I had enough,
01:02:42
Speaker
created. There was four of us from our team and we showed them the 30-minute plan and we showed them this idea we had for playbooks. I wanted to know, is there anything out there right now that does this? Because if there is, that's all we need. We'll support that effort and keep it going.
01:03:03
Speaker
And they said, no. And if not, and if not, no, we have a suggestion. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what it turned out to be. And so we said, they said, no, there's things that they're being talked about. And the Chem Responder program was just beginning because of Fukushima. That's a FEMA based system that is very similar to what we were thinking. But we work with Chem Responder now. It's a great effort. And a lot of fire agencies don't know it's there yet because
01:03:33
Speaker
They just debuted the Kim version. They had the rad responder for radioactive, but now they have the Kim responder. You can get mapping and plume modeling. It can be right on your phone or on your laptop as you're rolling to a scene. You can do a lot of really good stuff. That would be a good interview for you too.
01:03:53
Speaker
because they're really great people. They'd love to do that. But anyhow, the bottom line is they said no. And I said, okay, well, we could work on it, but how would we get it out there? And they said, well, if you're thinking about it being a requirement, you know, we can't even enforce what we got in a good way as far as emergency planning goes because it's hard to judge it. I mean,
01:04:21
Speaker
And to see somebody that has a good working emergency plan is to see them actually perform. And how are we going to go out and make sure everybody is performing? Uh, he said, you're going to have to find a way to make it so they want to have it. And, and that was the, uh, aha moment is okay. So the angle is build something that is simple, easy to use, but yet goes deep when you need it to, to get the details that you want.
01:04:49
Speaker
So we started working on it and now we're ready. I think next month we'll probably go, we're going live with the training with providers who are going to put, you know, that'll be putting it out into the public view. But we have four, four playbooks, one for each phase of response. We have master maps and we have, you know, checklists and we have ways of taking simple to detailed, you know, on, on that you can have as a web app on your phone or on your laptop.
01:05:16
Speaker
So that's going to help a lot and it's going to make plants so they're more self-sufficient. Get them back into the ball game on emergency response and process safety management is now more than just, you know, like emergency planning. You write the plans and then what, they sit in a book and
01:05:40
Speaker
Nobody looks at them until the ocean investigator shows up and they blow the dust off or when something's going sideways. That's exactly right. And the sharp inspector knows if they look at their process safety manual and they see notes all over it and greasy fingerprints, they say, okay, this company is doing something.
01:06:02
Speaker
And that's a thumbs up, believe me. That's right. Go ahead. I saw that as a former, I was an ocean investigator for over a decade. Oh, so you know. I do. And the last catastrophe that I investigated was an explosion at an ethanol plant.
01:06:23
Speaker
And a young man lost his life in that and two others were injured. And when I was reviewing their processes, that's exactly what happened, Gary. I'm like, where's your documentation? Where's your processes? How were you supposed to do this? Or what did you claim to do? And they wheel in by the little red wagon load all these binders.
01:06:52
Speaker
and they're all pristine minus the dust. And every step in a process had one big pen line through it with a date on it.
01:07:02
Speaker
You know, like they were, they weren't doing anything other than, Hey, we better put a date in this process. And then we're going to take our big pen here and just put one line through all of these things. You can, you can, you can imagine what happened with the investigation. But anyway, I understand what you're saying. Yes. You want to see the greasy, dirty ones. You want to see the ones that people can start talking about and like get excited about how they executed their plan. Exactly. The other way. Yeah.
01:07:30
Speaker
I had my partner with me from the industry, his name is Sonny Basadua, but back in the 80s when I was first learning Sonny was my same age. And so we were both young and he was just becoming a plant operator, manager for America. And he had the bug to do things right. I mean, that's just the way he did everything. His plant was always clean. I mean, it's 30 years. Gosh, it's 40 years old now.
01:08:01
Speaker
When Sonny was in charge, it looked brand new every year. I mean, they kept it up really spotless. And when you looked at his PSM manual, they got yellow stickies and notes all over it, you know, and, and he, he took it seriously, just like, you know, what we were doing with the emergency planning element. So, uh, to the two of us were really, uh, you know, did a lot on, on working on pre-emergency readiness logic, you know, so when you're doing high risk maintenance,
01:08:28
Speaker
that you also include the fact that this could go bad. And if it does go bad, why not have your command team ready to take action? And so alerting them as to when, like one time he was changing out a valve in a condenser, which on a pneumonia system, that's high pressure stuff. And it's, he had to isolate the condenser, got to drain it down and pump it out. And then,
01:08:55
Speaker
and change the valve and put it back in together. A lot of moving parts and it's a dangerous time. So he did pre-emergency readiness. And lo and behold, the transfer line when they're moving the ammonia out of the condenser broke. It was a braided line. It was made for portable movement of ammonia. It broke.
01:09:19
Speaker
But they already knew that that was one of the areas that they were concerned about if something happened, what would we do to isolate? And he didn't miss a beat. He took command, he made his notification. When you look at a command team in an industrial facility, you need four people. Somebody to take charge, always, that's the law. Somebody to take charge, who can meet and work with the fire department, give the CAN report,
01:09:48
Speaker
coordinate operations for the industry. You need also somebody who we call the lead responder who is really knows the emergency, knows the operation of the ammonia system and is the go-to guy for doing emergency system control. And that's all they focus on is system and the problem and how to deal with the problem and report directly to the incident commander.
01:10:15
Speaker
Thirdly, you need somebody who's shaking charge of notification and documentation, somebody who's going to make the calls. And they have to be alert. They have to be one of the first to get the ball rolling a lot of occasions is make the alerts, get the rest of the team going and make the calls based on what you got. And then of course, the fourth person is, and this is all in sync, they work as a team. It's called the evacuation group supervisor in charge of all the people issues.
01:10:45
Speaker
including access control and meeting the fire department directly into the command post and a lot of those kinds of things. So those four people are alerted. And when that hose broke, he went to the commander and he became the commander and his lead responder knew what they were to do. And then the notification went to the clerk who was the
01:11:08
Speaker
the notification officer who could make the calls. And the whole process was beginning. But as it was starting, because they were in sync, they were able to isolate that almost immediately. And what it turned out to be is a blow off of ammonia that went into the atmosphere and was quickly shut off. And the good thing about ammonia, of course, is that it is a natural product. And when it goes to atmosphere,
01:11:37
Speaker
you know, it converts to, it lives in the atmosphere for about a week. It breaks down to nitrogen and hydrogen, which is in the atmosphere already and has no effect on global warming and is also, it doesn't have anything on, you know, it doesn't have any impact on the ozone or any of the other things that atmospheric gases, you know, cause.
01:12:03
Speaker
And it's pure form, you know, getting it to atmosphere and letting it break down is safe. Now you don't, you know, anything has got dangers. You've got a lot of ammonia, like in feed lots and things like that, that's going up all the time while it's mixing with other things in the atmosphere. And there is a pollution factor that you have to deal with, just like anything that, you know, that you release. You can't just let it go. You've got to understand it deeper than that.
01:12:32
Speaker
But from the standpoint of small releases like that, that's what you want it to do. Go to atmosphere and let it break down. So anyhow, the bottom line is PSM comes into play in an even a more effective way because now in the playbooks, we're doing pre-event readiness and emergency system control is one of the things that the process safety management requirements have as a requirement that you
01:13:02
Speaker
can in fact engage when you have procedures, a system control plan. In fact, you're supposed to build it for components within your system. So that would be all in, that would interface the process safety management logic is interfaced into the playbooks. And it works good.
01:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, so Gary, everything that you've been talking about has been building up to, I'm assuming, what was the birth of what we talked about at the beginning when I introduced you as the Ammonia Safety and Training Institute. And you're still working on, it's been a work in progress, it sounds like all these years, and you're still working on it now and introducing new things and ways to make this,
01:13:48
Speaker
more understandable and consumable so people don't have to learn it by the way that you did through trial and error. And it sounds like mostly trial. But for our guests who are listening to this, a lot of what you've shared in your stories have just been phenomenal today.
01:14:11
Speaker
You know, ammonia or process safety management and hazardous materials, these kind of things are sort of vexing to a lot of people, particularly when they're starting out in their jobs, like, oh my gosh, PSM, how am I going to do that? That sounds really complex. Or ammonia, that's really scary.
01:14:31
Speaker
If people are listening and thinking, okay, this is everything Gary's talking about is my life right now, except I don't even know where to start. Resources, Gary, what would you recommend for people as they're scratching their head and going, oh, behemoth? That's a very, very good question because it goes back to what we started about when we first started talking about those, taking those
01:14:59
Speaker
opportunities to recognize you got a gap and you got to fill that gap. And I guess the answer kind of comes back to what got me into this whole process with ASTI, the Ammonia Safety Training Institute.
Growth of ASTI
01:15:21
Speaker
And it happened in 1991. We had already been
01:15:28
Speaker
Doug and I and the Hill Brothers group and the Rita chapter and a lot of the players locally, we already knew we needed to organize something because nobody had anything going on with regards to emergency response with ammonia in public safety or in the industry that really had a handle on the kinds of things that we were recognizing.
01:15:51
Speaker
We created that and we started providing training and training and networking with other individuals and sharing experiences and listening to podcasts like this and having resources available to you where you continue to build your knowledge base and your connection with people. Because I know that I talked a lot about what I went through because that's what the questions were. But as I mentioned earlier,
01:16:18
Speaker
you know, many, many hundreds of people that have directly impacted this whole story. And they continue to, it's growing even more so now, uh, where we have, you know, affiliates in other countries even. So you, you learn a lot from being a part of the network and joining associations and really being serious about wanting to do it better. There, there's a, one of our, one of our, uh, um,
01:16:45
Speaker
My favorite young developing leaders, his name is Alan Jervis. He works for Western pre-cooling and Craig Miller, the owner of Western pre-cooling and Don Tragathon, who is his right-hand man for engineering. They really, just like the hills and just like the rest of our board members. We have the president, Craig, we are a winner for air gas, air gas specialties. He's on the board.
01:17:14
Speaker
We have Manny Ehrlich, who has just retired off the Chemical Safety Board. He's on the board. And I could go on. Kent Anderson, who went for years as the president of the IAR and continues to help and was a board member as well. I mean, these people have tons of knowledge and ability. We have operators and managers and leaders in the area.
01:17:41
Speaker
you can get just about any question you have answered. So getting back to how does the struggling person do? Alan, we actually have a, we've been doing safety days for years where we provide free training to people and he does a class about how he was in a whole nother industry. He worked for, I think it was a locksmith or he put in doors and locks and he had hands on,
01:18:07
Speaker
ability. And he was just a natural leader in a lot of things he did. And he's very, he's very, um, he doesn't carry a big ego. He, he's very discreet about, you know, knowing what he doesn't know and being open to learning what he doesn't know. And because he knows there's a lot out there and he, all he has to do is, you know, find the right people and ask the right questions. Well, he struggled with that at first because he was thrown into a job in a way because
01:18:35
Speaker
when they hired him to do basic safety stuff, all of a sudden he was put in charge of managing a whole cold storage facility. And he knew nothing about it, just like I did when I came on fire. And what he did though, is he talked to enough people who directed them to people that could mentor and help them.
01:18:54
Speaker
And when he went there, he didn't go begging for, you know, come over and do this for me. It was help me be stronger and give me some information that I don't have now about what I should be doing. And then he would go do it. Well, to make a long story short and a very short, you know, three, four years, he was managing that facility and really doing a great job. And now he works for Craig Miller.
01:19:22
Speaker
and Don Tragathon because they have, they do a lot of maintenance and repair for a lot of these hydrovax and cold storage facilities. And so he's the safety manager for them. A very effective, another great interview about how do you progress? He did a whole session about, you know, going from having no knowledge to all of a sudden, you know, he will be the first to say, I don't have it all. I'll never have it all, but I feel a lot better today because of the way
01:19:51
Speaker
I engaged and got help from others. So it's a dynamic that you just have to recognize and know that you don't know. That's the first step. And then do something about it and plan it out.
01:20:06
Speaker
Well, we'll be sure to in the show notes for this episode to include a link to the Ammonia Safety and Training Institute for sure, Gary, as well as, gosh, I'm so interested to know if America burning is something that is a text that we can get our hands on because I have a feeling people are probably googling it while we've been talking.
01:20:27
Speaker
because that sounds super interesting too. As we wrap up our time today and my gosh, thank you so much for all of the stories and all the time you've given. It's been excellent. I wanted to ask just a couple more things. You had mentioned to me when we talked prior to the recording that ammonia is the most popular chemical in the world and that there's exciting stuff
01:20:55
Speaker
I mean, that sounds kind of out there to say, right? But exciting stuff about ammonia today. So what, why is it so popular? And what's exciting about it? Well, you know, the early days, as you know, that, you know, the fact that it's a, it's a great fertilizer, and it's a very efficient refrigerant for large systems, because it has, because of its chemical factors, it's got really a good latent heat type of. So what that means is,
01:21:25
Speaker
is you can take an ammonia refrigeration system and the ammonia will hold heat in a way that when you use it as a coolant, it absorbs a lot of the heat that comes into the system from the evaporators. And it doesn't need to be compressed as much because it handles a lot more heat load and releases it out of the condensers. So it's efficient. It saves a lot of power, which saves the industry from polluting as well.
01:21:53
Speaker
Well, that's been good and obviously the agriculture has been good. I don't know the third of the population living today because they can get food. But the thing that's exciting is that just recently over the last, I've been following this ammonia fuels association for about 20 years. They had a program that it's a group of professors from different universities.
01:22:17
Speaker
And a few entrepreneurial innovators that, um, you know, when the, when the fuel shortages got really tough during the cartel days and the eighties and such, a few people converted their cars to, to run on ammonia. And in fact, in the, in world war one, world war two, in that era, the buses in Germany ran on ammonia, you know, so ammonia as a fuel has always been a possibility. It's just that it's.
01:22:46
Speaker
It doesn't have the octane factor and the availability of gasoline, which gasoline is, in my mind, much more dangerous than ammonia, but that's a different story. But anyhow, the bottom line is now they can make ammonia out of air and water, meaning they have the Harbor Bosch process that could be run by solar, hydraulic, or any natural form of energy that's environmentally safe.
01:23:15
Speaker
You build the synthesizer, the electrolyzer, I should say, that has the capacity to take air and water and make ammonia out of it. And so what we have then is the ability to make the ammonia and store it.
01:23:36
Speaker
You know, those that are pretty heavy into the fossil fuels already are not as anxious to look at this option. But, but the Japanese came to us, uh, because they had Fukushima, as you remember, and they, they're very, uh, on top of it environmentally and have a small country and they didn't allow, they don't allow chemicals or, you know, ammonia is not even a part of, you know, life at all there.
01:24:04
Speaker
but they had heard about the potential that it has because it can be manufactured green and it could be an alternative for the power industry. So there was about, I think it was six or eight engineers that came over. They had heard about me through the associate and somehow from one of our engineers from process safety engineer, Jerry Jones, I believe has introduced them. And they came over
01:24:32
Speaker
Um, and, and, oh, I got to stop it right there. I, um, that John Mott, uh, who was from Australia, who was the president CEO of Gordon brothers. And, and, um, when he retired, he had been working with me on the ammonia safety issues. Cause he was a part of the international Institute of ammonia refrigeration too. And we became very good friends at the same time I met Anders. So, you know, he, and he's an engineer and knew a lot about things. And so.
01:25:00
Speaker
John worked with the Fuels Association in Australia and then he made the link with these Japanese folks that wanted to, engineers that wanted to figure out, can we live with ammonia? And I said, well, we got 25 plants right here. So they were amazed. We had a great time together a couple of days and we went around and we looked at it and we talked about it.
01:25:24
Speaker
And they were very gracious and it was fun and they went home and I never heard anything more. And then about a year later, all of a sudden, there's a video out.
01:25:33
Speaker
If you just Google, you know, green ammonia, you'll quickly and put Japan after it, you'll go and they have a wonderful video that shows how they're going to be using ammonia in the power production industry. And in fact, they have a Toyota car that runs on ammonia and they have a number of uses that even augment some of their power generation because ammonia is used to reduce the knocks
01:26:02
Speaker
than the nitrous oxides that are created by using the clean coal logic. And so they're going to really step up their use of ammonia, which then got the maritime industry interested, which they use a lot of the shipping that uses millions and millions and millions of tons of bunker oil, which is highly polluting with carbon.
01:26:29
Speaker
They are also looking at ways to cut that back and LPG and some of the other things that they've been working with and ammonia now is what they would like to also add to their mix on reducing their carbon output. And so you could, Australia, and now there's like a, God, there's 10 or 12 of these green ammonia plants popping up all over the place, but they're building, their plant is gonna be producing the green ammonia
01:26:58
Speaker
And then we're working with Singapore and they're going to transport it to Japan and other places that will use it so they don't have to store a lot of it because Australia, especially outside of Perth and some of the areas that they have places they can safely store and transport is really closer. So the South Pacific started the ball rolling and then Saudi Arabia is kicking in and some of the other countries.
01:27:21
Speaker
I know I've been working with the Department of Homeland Security and CSAC and some of the scientists there. They're definitely interested in looking more at how to be able to handle the load because right now we use over 500 million tons of ammonia throughout the country in different ways.
01:27:44
Speaker
Getting it in play and getting the infrastructure and going is something that needs a lot of work. But it's a really great possibility for really dealing with a lot of the carbon output and with a product that it's scary. People are scared of it when they realize how to handle it.
01:28:03
Speaker
Recently, we had an unfortunate circumstance where we lost five people the other day in a nitrogen incident, asphyxiated and frozen. Well, ammonia does the same thing, but there's one big difference.
01:28:19
Speaker
Ammonia stinks so badly. Remember that first thought about ammonia? It's scary. It stinks. Well, I got to get out of here. Yeah. And so what do you do with ammonia? You just go inside because the gas is lighter than air in a general sense, and it's going to want to escape. It doesn't want to get into a warm building. It's a cold gas. And so shelter in place or moving lateral and upwind, it's easy to get away from.
01:28:45
Speaker
And generally speaking, by the time it gets outside, the levels drop down to the point where you can't escape. It's only when you're really close to it that the risks are higher. And that's where training comes in to mitigate and prepare. And that's what it's all about.
01:29:00
Speaker
So, so interesting, Gary. I mean, and it sounds like if we wanted to headline ammonia, it's like ammonia, it's just getting started. You know, it sounds like there's so much more that can happen with it and so much more that we've all learned and that you've been on the tip of the spear of that learning experience and teaching all these years. Thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for sharing this
01:29:30
Speaker
really fascinating conversation and your career and career progression. Really appreciate it, really appreciate it. And so for our listeners, I know on my notes, I'm paying attention to what Gary said about the tripod of hazard risk and threat and also prevent them all or stop them small
01:29:53
Speaker
It's stuck in my head and hopefully it's stuck in others as well. But Gary, thank you again so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure and all the preparation you went through and to Will for the sound system made it comfortable and I was ready.
01:30:12
Speaker
And it was very, very enjoyable. Thank you. Yeah, very good. Thank you. Yeah, good shout out to Will, our producer. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good. Making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day.
01:30:29
Speaker
Amen. That's right. And if anyone wants to join the conversation about this episode or any of our previous episodes, you can follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro Community Group on Facebook. And if you aren't already subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player that you find.
01:30:51
Speaker
We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more safety and health professionals like Gary and myself. Special thanks again to Will Moss, our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.