Science isn’t a word we’d expect to hear when talking about fire or emergency services. But major spills and leaks, hazardous material fires, poisonings and explosives are all emergencies that involve chemicals – and we know there is a lot of science behind that. Jeff Davis is DFES’ only scientist and it’s his job to give advice on how to safely handle potentially dangerous chemicals before, during and after an emergency. That advice could be given in person, over the phone, even while he’s overseas on a family holiday. In the world of emergency services – Jeff’s role is critical and could be the difference between a good and bad day.
Science isn’t a word we’d expect to hear when talking about fire or emergency services.
But major spills and leaks, hazardous material fires, poisonings and explosives are all emergencies that involve chemicals – and we know there is a lot of science behind that.
Jeff Davis is DFES’ only scientist and it’s his job to give advice on how to safely handle potentially dangerous chemicals before, during and after an emergency.
That advice could be given in person, over the phone, even while he’s overseas on a family holiday.
In the world of emergency services – Jeff’s role is critical and could be the difference between a good and bad day.
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Credits:
Host and producer: Silvana Pulitano
Guest: Jeff Davis
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Transcript:
For a full transcript of this episode, visit: https://bit.ly/45xX6dT
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This episode may contain reference to traumatic events. Listener discretion is advised.
Visit https://www.dfes.wa.gov.au/copyright for copyright information.
[Silvana Pulitano, Podcast Host] You're listening to Mics and Sirens, the official podcast of the Department of Fire and Emergency Services in Western Australia. DFES acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Whadjuk people.
[Sirens sound while news footage of fires play]
[Jeff Davis] We had a call for mercury in a quarantine bin at the airport. I was really perturbed that it had been on an aircraft because mercury eats holes in aircraft. The aircraft turned out to be an Airbus that was in North America. We had it grounded immediately. Quite often what I'm concerned about is something that they're not even looking at because they're looking at the big thing that they're worried about, and the little tiny thing next to it is actually the thing that can blow up and cause everything to go, go really wrong.
[Silvana] So I take it, given all that, dangerous chemicals don't scare you?
[Jeff] No. [Laughs]
[Silvana] Science isn't a word we'd expect to hear when talking about fire or emergency services. But major spills and leaks, hazardous material fires, poisonings and explosives. They're all emergencies that involve chemicals. There's one scientist within DFES, Jeff Davis, who you just heard from, and it's his job to give advice on how to safely handle these potentially dangerous chemicals. That advice could be given in person or over the phone, on his way to a job that could be hundreds of kilometres away, even while he's overseas on a family holiday. In the world of emergency services, Jeff's job could be the difference between life and death. And as a result, he has a lot of very fascinating stories to tell. Jeff, thank you for joining me.
[Jeff] That's good, that's good.
[Silvana] I think it's important to start with how science and a scientist fits into the world of emergency services. Can you talk me through your role as a Scientific Officer? What do you do?
[Jeff] Okay, my role is weird and multifaceted. So, there's a whole range of different, I suppose, activities I take, or undertake. I'd say the first one will be operational, for example, for operational incidents. So be they spills, leaks of chemicals, fires. In some cases, situations where people have committed suicide with chemicals and the scene in the body is dangerous for the responders to respond to. So I provide - and there's a range of other incidents, but they're examples. There's also unknown materials in, say, parliamentary offices or VIPs, venues and buildings. So I'll provide technical advice and assistance and liaison with other agencies to deal with those incidents and provide the Incident Controller and the Incident Management Team advice on what the options are, what's most likely to happen, what could happen, worst case, and therefore how to put things in place to mitigate that. So that's the first one that's operational. Then there's planning type things. So where I get involved with the Land Use Planning people in DFES, with local government, with Built Environment Branch, with proponents for developments, roads, projects, because the Building Code and the usual rules aren't adequate to deal with the additional hazards that are approached or that are presented by chemicals and processed plants and so forth being installed. Not just the plan itself, but also everything that comes from that. If it's a new major facility, then it may be importing raw materials or transporting them by road, rail, sea to get there and or producing products that are going the other way. And all of that is stuff then that our crews may need to respond to that wasn't there before and has implications for training, for what vehicles we might have there, how we're going to respond, what we might need to bring from Perth or somewhere else to a regional area to respond, and also what we expect of industry and sort of giving them a bit of coaching on what we would like them to do, to deal with as much of the problem they've introduced as they can rather than just ring 000 and we magically disappear a problem that no one told us they'd put there in the first place sort of thing. So there's that side of it.
There's development of operational procedures and processes and advice in that space. And I have a fair bit of strategic impact nationally that I represent the Australasian Fire and Emergency Services Authorities Council, AFAC, on the Competent Authorities Panel for Dangerous Goods with all the regulators nationally, the Australian Forum of Explosives Regulators. And I also chair a technical committee at Standards Australia called CH9, which is for safety of chemicals, and that's responsible for writing and updating most of the Australian standards to do with storage and handling of dangerous goods. And through that, there's a very big network of people that I get involved with across the country in industry and government, to mitigate and minimise risk and hazard associated with dangerous goods and chemicals. So that's a fair bit of it.
Evaluation of new technologies as well as new sites going in. There's new things that come into the market that then we may need to respond to. And or they may provide technologies that we can use to respond with to incidents as well. So new widgets. Sort of, not quite the cue out of James Bond, but you know, looking at what toys are out there, what problems they can cause for us in the community, but also what use they may be. And there's other parts of DFES that do that as well, but I keep up to speed with that.
[Silvana] So I take it, given all that, dangerous chemicals don't scare you?
[Jeff] No. [Laughs] What does scare me is people that don't know what they're doing with them, whether they're planning, designing, regulating, constructing, transporting, running businesses where they supply or import or export those materials is a - over time, there's been less and less technical people in industry and government, and therefore the people that are there have a lot higher demand on their expertise and skills to provide the right advice, to make sure that hazards are identified, risks are managed, and things that are being done are done as safely as they can be, and we're in the pictures so that we know that we might need to respond to whatever it is.
[Silvana] You mentioned a few of the incidents you attend. Can you give us a quick snapshot of something a scientific officer would attend?
[Jeff] So a spill and that's not every spill is the more complex and unusual one. So it may be that, the nature of how big it is, what it is or where it is and what it's next to is more complex than usual, or we don't know what it is and it could be something problematic. Or we might have an incident, for example, where we've got a fire in a premises or in a type of business that I know that type of business has X, Y, and Z that can be very problematic or dangerous. And therefore I'll contact the people involved in our part of DFES to suggest that I probably should attend this incident, just to make sure that we are on top of the hazards that are there, and the Incident. Management Team are aware of how to manage them and that they are present to be dealt with.
[Silvana] What is the strangest or funniest incident that you've attended? You've obviously attended a lot of weird and wonderful things. What's the strangest or funniest thing that you've seen?
[Jeff] I'll probably go one of the ones with the most immediate ramifications, and that was a barometer that was - well, actually, I'll go back one. We had a call for mercury in a quarantine bin at the airport, and I thought, well, this is a bit unusual. So we went to that. And the first question was, where did this mercury come from? Why is it in the quarantine bin at the arrivals hall in the airport? And it transpired that in the last day or two prior, someone had brought a mercury barometer in on an aircraft. It was broken, it had been leaking, and the quarantine staff had sort of swept up the mercury and it had gone in the bin, and no one had thought anything about it until someone saw it in the bin and we got called. I wasn't particularly perturbed by the mercury in the bin in the airport. I was really perturbed that it had been on an aircraft because mercury eats holes in aircraft. So my immediate concern was to find out what flight that had been on, who the airline was, and where on earth, literally the aircraft was. The aircraft turned out to be an Airbus that was in North America. We had it grounded immediately. The wiring loom and everything was completely stripped out of the airframe to look for mercury. The service life of the aircraft was halved and the frequency of internal inspections was doubled for the remaining life of the aircraft. So, that one, if we hadn't done that, could have resulted in an aircraft crash anywhere on the planet from the incident that had occurred, that we became aware of at Perth Airport. So it's sort of a minor mercury spill from our perspective at the airport, but the ramifications could have been huge, somewhere else on the planet.
[Silvana] If it were just contained to Perth Airport, would that have been okay?
[Jeff] It would have been relatively straightforward to deal with. Yeah.
[Silvana] What's the scariest incident you've attended?
[Jeff] Again, they're weird and wonderful. There's been a lot, but I'll pull one. And that was in the last few years, and it was an incident where we had an industrial fire which had burnt overnight. Quite a large industrial fire with fireballs and a lot of media coverage. The following morning, whilst things were still smouldering but crews were overhauling, there was a shipping container that had been involved in the fire outside, that I knew it had a mixture of sulphuric and nitric acid in it, but it started producing brownish orange fumes - quite a lot of them. My concern immediately is that is from that acid mixing with something that we weren't told was in the container, and I needed to really quickly find out what was in the container, or what else was in the container. I found out what that other material was, and that would react with the sulphuric and nitric acid to make a really unstable high explosive, which could then detonate. And of course is not good for crews or anyone else around. The only way, however, I could work out to make that safe was to throw a lot of water in there to dilute it, and that would have would have caused the acid to dissolve the shipping container and make a very large cloud of toxic, corrosive brown-y orange gas.
So I got in contact with someone from ChemCentre because I could only identify bad option. Lots of toxic gas or worse option, detonation crater and shrapnel and debris going everywhere. The ChemCentre chemist that got there, I talked through what we were doing, what I'd come back with, and what I'd determined, and he concurred. And I went, okay, well, we've got bad or worse, so let's go with bad. I advised the Incident Controller. We had Police Air Wing there with high resolution drones. We made sure that the entire industrial area downwind was completely evacuated. And then we started to add water and control the rate at which a very large cloud of toxic brown gas was generated. And we continued to do that until that was made safe.
[Silvana] How could you control that?
[Jeff] By the rate of addition of water, and basically keeping an eye on the wind and using the drones to see where it was going so.
[Silvana] I want to talk about some of the incidents you've attended. The town of Western Australia, New Norcia. In 2023, a truck caught fire carrying ammonium nitrate emulsion. Can you talk me through that? Firstly, why the chemical plus the combination of fire was so dangerous and what your role was in that incident.
[Jeff] I'll talk through it, I suppose chronologically as it started. So I was out for a jog on the foreshore in Rockingham at about 9pm, and I got a phone call saying we have an ammonium nitrate truck - is what we were told at the time - was on fire, involved in fire, adjacent to New Norcia on the bypass road. So my first question back to the Special Operations Advisor who rang me, who was the first point of contact for me, and the rest of what was then special operations at the time, is to contact me. I'll then say, well, okay, first, what is it? Is it ammonium nitrate? Is it ammonium nitrate an emulsion? Is it a hot solution? Because there's about 10 to 12 different ammonium nitrate products, all of which are problematic in fires.
It became apparent that an evacuation was in progress. But I said, well, that needs to be an absolute minimum of 1.6km, but I would recommend two kms. And then knowing New Norcia, the bypass road is not very far from the 1800s vintage construction, particularly the monastery, which is, I think three storeys high. So if that truck did detonate, which it could, it would knock all of those buildings down. So we had to evacuate everything because we did not want people in the buildings if that went off because they'd be buried in rubble, and we'd have either people deceased or people to rescue out of collapsed buildings.
So the initial advice was about back to the Incident Controller post-haste was to evacuate to two kilometres and shut the roads and so forth. And then just let the fire burn. It's too dangerous for crews to go in because if it goes off, we'll lose our responders. And once we've got people evacuated, there's no reason to put anyone at risk. We'll sit back and just let it do its thing. It didn't go off. We monitored that remotely for some time. I also had the airspace closed over that. So we get on to Airservices Australia to put what's called a NOTAM out to five kilometres and 20,000ft. So no one flies anywhere near it in a commercial flight, unwittingly at night, and then has this big boom go on underneath them. So we put that in place, waited till it burnt right down, and then carefully went in with thermal imaging camera, or cameras, and checked it out. Once that was okay, we could go in and can overhaul the last part of the fire, and then there's still questions about the stability of the product, because it's been heated with all the burning tyres and stuff under it isn't exactly the same product as it was to start with. So there was concerns from the industry people that would be involved in recovery as to whether it would still be a stable material or whether it had transitioned to become explosive because it had been effectively cooked a bit in the fire.
So I got up on top of the tanker, opened the thing. I'm quite familiar with what the product looks like and how it behaves, because I was previously, for almost a decade, an inspector of explosives and dangerous goods in another agency. So I know what it looks like and it was quite fluid, looked in good condition, reported that back and that facilitated then getting crews from Perth to be able to come in from the company involved and recover the vehicle and the product and get us with Main Roads back in a situation where the roads could be opened, and people could be returned back to their houses and all that sort of thing.
[Silvana] Is ammonium - the different types of ammonium nitrate, are they visible to the naked eye or do you have to test them?
[Jeff]] Oh no I can - you can tell what it is by - if you know it's ammonium nitrate product when you look at it, if you know what you're doing, you can tell which one it is. Yeah.
[Silvana] How do you safely remove these products and transport them.
[Jeff] As in safely normally transport them or?
[Silvana] Yep.
[Jeff] So the way they're packaged and transported is set out through rules that are governed through the Australian Dangerous Goods Code, which is implemented in each state and territory have been called up by the state and territory legislation. So the Dangerous Goods Transport Legislation WA. But that is referred back into United Nations recommendations for the transport of dangerous goods. So it's internationally consistent as to what the rules are, or what the requirements are that are complied with. So with the ammonium nitrate, it's either in bulker bags, big plastic bags that are about a cubic metre, or it's in various types of dump truck. Commonly that's how it's moved. Excuse me. The hot solution is moved in heated road tankers, which are a fairly standard sort of thing as well. And the ammonium nitrate emulsion is moved in what's called a banana tanker, which is basically two conical, halves welded together. So it looks sort of banana shape, hence why they're called banana tankers. But it can also be moved in, roughly 18 to 20,000 litre ISO tanks. So like a tank in a shipping container frame. So we see all of those on the road in WA and by rail.
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[Silvana] This is Mics & Sirens. I'm here with Scientific Officer Jeff Davis to talk about science and emergencies. Can you tell me about your role in Cyclone Seroja in 2021?
[Jeff] That was an interesting one because I'm a technical advisor for the department, primarily. I was approached and basically told that, "Congratulations, you're a division commander for the response for HAZMAT, for Cyclone Seroja." And I thought initially, well, someone's pulling my leg here because I'm an advisor, not an operational commander. But that was the story. So I was told that. I was in the State Operations Centre at the time anyway. And so I deployed to Kalbarri, flew to Geraldton, drove to Kalbarri. But I took an expert from WorkSafe on asbestos issues, an expert from the Department of Water and Environment Regulation, what was then called the Pollution Response Unit, now the Environment Response Unit, and an expert from Health, from Public Health who was also asbestos guru, effectively, deployed with them. Got to Kalbarri and had a look at Northampton as well because there was damage in Northampton obviously. And then started working out what we needed to do with regards to the asbestos component of the response from the cyclone damage. So, to give people, I suppose, a indication of what we encountered, for example, a jarrah light pole in the street up there. I could see something in the light pole, maybe five metres up. Zoomed in with a camera, and it was a piece of asbestos about two centimetres in diameter that had actually been, by the wind, driven into the jarrah light pole.
[Silvana] Oh wow.
[Jeff] So that's how severe the wind had been. And that was part of a house that was only two-centimetre piece of sheeting that had been smashed to pieces. When we got there, there was a range of - there was asbestos broken all over the place and other things. Solar panels were problematic because they are still active, and when they're broken off the roof and the sun shining on them, they've got live currents that can start fires and things. So we had to deal with those as well.
With the asbestos, the main concern is where it's been. The sheeting that's broken, really doesn't release a lot of fibres. It's once that gets ground up and powdered, and that had happened on the roads. So sheeting had landed on the roads and then people had driven everywhere and crushed it all. So we had to shut those roads immediately, and then isolate those. We reduced the speed limit in the whole town. We got water carts in initially to dampen that, to stop dust blowing around, and then with several agencies, things started prioritising; what needed to clean up, be cleaned up in the right order, because we had limited resources to do that and a lot to clean up, and we continually reprioritise that. So that'll be talking, for example, to Western Power to work out which light poles were crucial and had to be done first. And that street, you know, was then dealt with first. It may have been cleaned up in some cases, requisitioned, a lot of tarpaulins from CBH, and we tarped an entire street at a time to get the Western Power trucks in slowly over the asbestos, so that we could get the poles done before we took the time-consuming job of cleaning that road. So there's a lot of techniques and we, what else do we do?
[Silvana] So your knowledge as a scientific officer is what put you in that position?
[Jeff] Yes. So coordinating a lot of different agencies. So we had a lab on site with external contractors. So they were doing air sampling and microscopy work to confirm fibre counts and types of fibres that were there. And that was giving us, live - or not live, but near real time - within an hour's feedback on what was going on with everything we were doing, so we were aware if anything did become a problem, which it didn't. We could confirm that what we were doing was not causing any hazards to or additional hazard to the public, and therefore, we had confidence in what we were doing in terms of being able to undertake activities. And we weren't presenting risk, and being able to also provide some confidence to the community that the risk wasn't astronomical. And it was within acceptable limits that would be accepted in any house anywhere in the country, which was basically what we were looking at. So we had those people. We had the environmental regulator and the local government with relation to how things were being collected for disposal. People, a lot of people clearing their properties and stacking asbestos out on the verges. We had contractors spray painting or sort of stabilising that with a dyed glue so that they could tell if it was blue, it had been done on Wednesday. Don't touch that stack. Start a new one. And then on Thursday or Friday they'd go through and do another colour. So we had that. We cleared a lot of stuff out of the rubbish tip by literally burning the tip with a whole pile of fire brigades so that we could clear as much burnable rubbish out and make enough room to start putting asbestos in there and clearing the streets of asbestos. So there was emergency powers to do that because otherwise the nearest waste facility was east of Geraldton. And so instead of a truck taking half an hour to take a load from Kalbarri, it would have been maybe one load a day all the way down east to Geraldton, unload and all the way back up, which would have really slowed down the recovery and the response efforts.
So there's those - there was a heap of different agencies involved, Energy Safety with regards to all the wiring issues for temporary wiring and all that sort of thing, and liaising with those people, because we also only had a very limited amount of people we could have in town for response because there was no or limited accommodation and food and all that sort of thing. So couldn't do what we'd normally do and deploy everyone we needed to. We had to continually triage who was actually necessary, and who we could get away with not having to fit in that time.
[Silvana] I guess as well, people would have been doubling up on roles and, you know, doing things they may not typically be doing.
[Jeff] Yeah. And I mean, in the role I was in, normally you would have a scribe with you because you're flat out doing that stuff. Someone else is trying to take the notes because you're making five decisions at once and everyone's ringing you. We just didn't have that. So we had to work with what we had. And as a technical team, you know, so those health at four agencies, myself and the other three, we spent a lot - we'd have dinner together and discuss over what had happened that day and have messaging ready for the town meeting the next day with the whole community, because we had town meetings at, I think, at 10 or 11 o'clock each morning.
So going through what issues are arising in the community that they're getting concerned about, and what the advice is for that. And then we'd deliver that the next morning to keep people in the loop of what was going on, particularly where things went backwards. You know, we'd cleared roads, everyone was happy. And then someone's dropped asbestos on the road, driven over it. And we've gone back to where we started again and the community was starting to get a little bit - not narked with us or getting unhappy with whoever had done that. So there was a degree of, I suppose, self-policing out there by the community, making sure everyone was doing the right thing.
[Silvana] I guess that incident wasn't really a typical day in the life of a scientific officer. Is there a typical day in your role?
[Jeff] No. [Laughs] Every time I think I've got the day planned and I've got the diary full of meetings and stuff, I can almost guarantee something big goes wrong somewhere, and I end up spending the whole day on that, whether it's at scene or advising remotely, or coordinating a lot of technical advice and assistance and or support from external agencies and industry, as applicable to whatever the incident is.
[Silvana] So how are you activated?
[Jeff] So I'm activated through the Special Operations Advisor. So through the Communication Centre. The Communication Centre gets contacted or for certain types of incidents the Special Operations Advisor is automatically notified. They'll make the initial calls, see what's going on with the incident, potentially call me and I'll provide advice or concerns that I have. And then depending on that, I might provide advice remotely. It might be okay and it doesn't need input. Or I might go, "Oh, hang on, you need to know about this." And then in some cases I will then respond to the incident and actually go to scene. Potentially, it's generally more effective if I'm near scene getting live information than getting it through three people that don't have a chemistry background. So, you know, they've said the name of the chemical. And by the time I get it, it's something completely different. And I'm looking at the name of the business and going - and the nature of the business. I think maybe they're talking about this, but it would be a lot easier if I was there.
[Silvana] So do you rely on photos, videos from people?
[Jeff] All sorts of things. So we'll try to get - we'll talk to people at scene, like the Incident Controller and responders on scene. We'll try to get - quite often, a facetime call so that they can turn the phone around and point it at stuff that I'm interested in. And quite often what I'm concerned about is something that they're not even looking at, 'cause they're looking at the big thing that they're worried about. And the little tiny thing next to it is actually the thing that can blow up and cause everything to go really wrong, sort of thing, so.
[Silvana] Is that hard in remote areas?
[Jeff] It can be. And in some cases, you know, I'll get photos to - from Facebook, surprisingly, because a lot of truckies take photos of stuff and post it so that other truckies know about it. And in those groups, I get sometimes quite, rapid photos from scene that we may not even have responders on scene yet. And I'm getting photos because a truckie’s posted something on a Facebook group, for example, and we can see that.
[Silvana] So you are the only Scientific Officer in the State.
[Jeff] In DFES.
[Silvana] What happens if you take a sick day or if you go on holidays?
[Jeff] Oh, they ring me up! No. [Laughs]
[Silvana] Have you had that?
[Jeff] I have had that. But, the Special Operations Advisor that I mentioned before, who's a conduit into me is also the conduit into a lot of other agencies. So we routinely work with ChemCentre to identify unknown materials and get chemical advice. As I said before, with getting the second opinion, because I only had bad or worse as that option, and I wanted another - phone a friend, ask another chemist to see if they could think of something I'd overlooked. So ChemCentre, what is now was the Pollution Response Units, now the Environment. Response Unit from Department of Water and Environment Regulation. So their people and they'll quite often attend incidents to look at runoff and plumes and so forth and provide advice on that. And that helps inform what we do for shelter in places and road closures and evacuations and those sorts of things.
There's clinical toxicologists in the hospital that get involved where poisonings are occurring from exposure to things. There's environmental toxicologists and environmental health experts from Health who advise in the public health side of, let's say, a school is downwind of an incident. Is the play equipment going to be safe for the kids? Should we open the school tomorrow? Do we need to clean things? All those sort of questions come in that space. Radiation health, another part of Health. What a radiological incident. They are the expert health physicists that get involved with those with us. And the list just goes on and on and on. The dangerous goods officers from, what is now DMIRS, where I used to work, they're the experts on not just the dangerous goods, but the construction of the trucks and the tankers and how they will behave when they're being picked up with a crane and they've crashed and all those sorts of things. So there's a large range of agencies that are available that I'm often a conduit into, but we've still got the contacts to, to call on all of those people after hours and around the clock.
[Silvana] A lot of your work relies on inter-agency collaboration. Can you talk about that?
[Jeff] Huge amount of it. So operationally, as I've just alluded to, but then also administratively, if I'm looking at a proposal for land use planning for a large new industrial development, you know, I then are dealing with people in those regulatory agencies that I've mentioned from the approval and planning and risk identification management side, but also the other agencies they're dealing with. So they might be planning authorities. There may be local governments, the builders, the construction folk, and within DFES, the local superintendent and crew. So they're aware of what this thing means to them and what they may need to respond to, not just on site, but as I alluded to before, you know, we've got new stuff going by road. How do we respond to a truck crash or a truck fire involving this stuff that we haven't seen before in the local area? You know, we provide the advice for those.
So there's all of that. And then as I said before with, say, standards and the national level stuff, I deal with my counterparts and all the other agencies in Australia, as well as the other dangerous goods related people. So, Australian Maritime Safety Authority, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, because they're involved in dangerous goods transport. And we have incidents on aircraft. You know, we've responded to things leaking on aircrafts or aircraft, for example, and occasionally on ships. You know, it's sort of interesting being in a encapsulated - a sort of splash suit and breathing apparatus on top of a load on a container ship in the wharf at two o'clocks in the morning, and it gets a bit windy up there. [Laughs] But it's a good view.
[Silvana] Is there an incident that has impacted you more than others?
[Jeff] Not really. I won't say they're all equal, but they're all very different and, well, not very different, but there's a lot of quite unique features of different ones. So I think one of the key things for me is, being aware of how people perceive things. Quite often, the risk is actually low as a scientist looking at statistics and it's very unlikely. Or, you know, this won't cause a grief, won't cause a problem or a health issue, but quite often we're actually dealing with perceptions rather than risks. So if, you know, a young family with very young children in the area and they can smell something "chemical", that's going to concern them, whether we can tell them that it's a "safe", in inverted commas, concentration or not. It doesn't really matter. They don't care. They just can smell it. They don't want to know about it being there. And so it's important to recognise that quite often in how we're responding to things, telling people it's safe with, you know, quite frankly, a person in a suit from Perth, when you're out in the bush somewhere doesn't really work. You've got to put it in the context of what you're looking at. And quite often we have to do different things to remove the perception or deal with the perception of the hazard and not just what the hazard is.
We've had that before where I've had, for example, ambulances that have been contaminated from a patient that was covered in something, and it took two days to get the ambulance to a concentration that was safe, but you could still smell it. Now, I'd imagine if someone is in labour, getting into the ambulance, they're not going to be very happy with the chemical smell in the ambulance. So you've got to deal with the extra bit to make sure that it's dealing with the perception problem as well as the actual hazard or risk.
[Silvana] You've seen a lot of confronting things in your role.
[Jeff] Yep.
[Silvana] How do you cope on days when you've seen something that's quite traumatic?
[Jeff] The traumatic thing to me usually isn't traumatic to me, which sounds odd. The thing that's probably most challenging is if you're dealing with an incident where all of the family are there, it's usually not the victim or the patient that concerns me. It's usually the response if the kids and the partner and all of that are there. But I think you work through that with the people you're there with. But also from my perspective, I need to be acutely aware of that if I'm advising people at an incident, that I've got to consider what reactions they may have to what they're going to do, because we can't have, in some of these situations, cannot have someone go in there and freeze or not be able to cope when they're in a critical position or critical role, or if they are, we've got a plan B, C, and D to make sure that we've got a way to deal with that. Work around it and continue to achieve the objective. For example, I don't know if we had a leaking toxic gas. We've got to get the valve turned off type thing or whatever that is. So.
[Silvana] So you need people to be their best?
[Jeff] Well, but also...
[Silvana] When they're dealing with these chemicals.
[Jeff] Not just be their best, but identify the limitations. You know, don't you don't have to be the: well, I'm going to go in and do it. And then it's better that they come up front and say, I don't think I'm going to be able to cope with this, then be in the middle of it and it doesn't work or they can't do - can't cope with what they're doing or they need to do. So and there's nothing wrong with - it's much better to say that up front and deal with that upfront and modify the plan, or get a new plan, than run with it and it's not going to work. Yeah.
[Silvana] What is something that people would be surprised to know about your job?
[Jeff] Probably the behind the scenes stuff. So people see me particularly in DFES at incidents and know that I provide technical advice about stuff that's going wrong now, but they don't necessarily see the follow on side of that. So I'll pick one example. And that was, several years ago now. We had a shipment of paraquat, a pesticide that came in through the Port of Fremantle, and there was two shipping containers of it. Both were taken by road. One went to a premises in. Maddington and another one went to a premises in Welshpool. They were full of 20 litre white plastic containers of this pesticide. Those containers had failed or some of them had. So there was this trail of paraquat on the roads to those two locations from Fremantle Port. We initially got called to one of the premises because the leak was noticed. And then when we started looking at it, we worked out what had happened and then sent trucks in reverse direction and identified stuff on the road all the way back to the port. Anyway, we dealt with that, but the thing that became apparent to me, I looked at one of the containers and, dangerous goods containers have United Nations approval marks on them to say that this has been tested and has met the criteria to be strong enough and suitable to handle dangerous goods. You can't just throw it in any old bucket or whatever. The approvals on these plastic drums were actually codes for cardboard boxes, so the supplier who'd provided that chemical had basically been ripped off overseas and been given fraudulent containers that someone had put fake markings on as approvals.
[Silvana] Oh wow. That's concerning.
[Jeff] And that was immediately apparent to me because the code was the code for an approved cardboard box, not a plastic drum. So we worked with, the dangerous goods regulator here, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, because it had gone by sea back into the regulator in Vietnam, back to the company that had provided it and got the product frozen where it was or grounded all over the world. And then got the containers, replaced with containers that were actually approved. So the company had basically didn't know they got ripped off. And we got that fixed across the whole planet. So that comes out of crews here dealing with a job in Welshpool and Maddington, but the tail end of it is right over the planet sometimes.
[Silvana] Wow. You've seen some very fascinating things in your career. Thank you so much for joining me, Jeff.
[Jeff] No worries. Thank you.
[Male Narrator] Are you looking for fast, accurate and official information, that helps you to make informed decisions to stay safe during an emergency? The Department of Fire and Emergency Services' Emergency WA app lets you set up watch zones for places important to you. So if an emergency happens in your watch zone, you'll receive alerts and warnings. The best part? It's sent direct to your mobile device. Download DFES' Emergency WA app from the App Store or Google Play today.
[Silvana] Thanks for listening to Mics & Sirens. I'm Silvana Pulitano. Join me in the next episode when I sit down with an emergency services volunteer who shares the details of an incredible search she was part of. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes.