EPA missed chance to calm nerves

Sunday, July 12, 2015 | 2 a.m.

For those in the disaster business, one nightmare involves radiation spewing from a ravaged nuclear power plant, a terrorist’s dirty bomb, the mishandling of nuclear waste, a transportation catastrophe or a scenario not yet imagined.

So naturally a wave of anxiety spread across the Western states — especially Nevada and California — when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it was going to move — this weekend, in fact — one of its two Mobile Environmental Radiation Laboratories from Las Vegas to Montgomery, Ala., to join the other one there, 2,000 miles away. The EPA said the move was driven by unavoidable budget-tightening and that the Las Vegas mobile radiation lab would be cannibalized for the benefit of the other, stored at the program’s base of operations.

Here’s where the EPA messed up: It didn’t carefully explain what the MERL’s function was, so it left a lot to the imagination of people who live and breathe fear of disasters. And they all feared the worst.

It didn’t calm nerves, for instance, that the MERL is operated by the EPA’s Radiological Emergency Response Team. The fact that anything was being removed from Las Vegas that was connected with an “emergency response team” surely would sound alarms. Remember, we’ve been shorted time and again when the Homeland Security Department dished out funds and we were left off the list. Now we’re getting slapped again.

Imagine now, a call coming in to Carson City: “Governor, the Radiological Emergency Response Team, line one.”

“In Las Vegas, right?”

“No. They’ve moved to Alabama.”

The anxiety spread among public officials and public advocacy groups.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service, for instance, called the EPA’s decision to relocate the portable lab from Las Vegas “a shockingly short-sighted move.”

“After next week, if there were an irradiated fuel shipment accident or ‘dirty bomb’ explosion in Nevada, or a meltdown at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant or irradiated fuel fire at San Onofre, there would be no EPA mobile radiation lab that could get there quickly and be used in the immediate aftermath to determine needed protective actions,” the organization says on its website and in an email to followers. “Urge your elected officials to do all they can to stop (the) EPA’s stubborn, misguided plan to do away with the only mobile, state-of-the-art equipment and instruments that can respond to emergency nuclear accidents or attacks ...”

From there, the story got into the hands of the NBC-TV affiliate in Los Angeles, which assigned its investigative team to the story, which was given the headline, “‘Dangerous decision’ could leave Californians vulnerable after nuclear disaster.”

In classic TV news hyperbole and with footage from Las Vegas, the reporter said, “Behind this fence is one of the government’s most important tools for keeping you safe if terrorists detonated a nuclear device in downtown LA or if there’s an accident at a nuclear facility.”

The reporter interviewed Vernon Hodge, a professor of environmental and analytical chemistry at UNLV, who told the camera: “I personally feel it’s a criminal act to remove the rapid-response unit from the West Coast. ... If they move this asset, they are on purpose jeopardizing the lives of the people.”

Even before the TV report aired, the anxiety caused by the MERL’s relocation had reached the offices of California Gov. Jerry Brown.

“State and local governments consider these lab systems as first-response assets,” Jennifer Chappelle, manager of California’s Radiological Preparedness Unit, wrote in a May complaint letter to EPA boss Gina McCarthy in Washington.

“During a major radiological incident, these laboratory assets are critical in providing local and state agency decision-makers the necessary data in order to make key public health decisions,” she wrote. “Leaving the western U.S. without this critical resource will increase response time to our state, jeopardizing our combined ability to adequately protect the public.”

All of this tension and upset could have been avoided had the EPA made clear, up front, the role of its mobile radiation laboratory. If the unfathomable happens, the response will come swiftly from the Homeland Security Department, Energy Department and other government resources, long before a mobile EPA laboratory-on-wheels lumbers down the highway.

“In the event of a radiological emergency, (the) EPA and other federal agencies with responsibilities for emergency response will be available to assist state and local responders with multiple radiological response assets,” Alan Perrin, deputy director of the EPA’s radiation protection division, wrote to Chappelle.

He explained that aerial monitors, hand-held instruments and predictive modeling tools are used to make public-safety decisions in the immediate wake of an incident. The MERL isn’t designed to analyze samples that are very radioactive, he said; its purpose is to take samples from ground and water during the intermediate and late phases of a response to help prioritize areas for additional monitoring and establishing perimeters for long-term cleanup efforts.

So we can all breathe deeply.

And for good measure, let us point out that the Energy Department and our local Desert Research Institute are partners in the Community Environmental Monitoring Program. It’s a network of 31 monitoring stations in communities surrounding and downwind of the Nevada National Security Site that measure the airborne and groundwater environments for man-made radioactivity that could result from activities at the former Nevada Test Site. If something there goes wrong, there’s already equipment in place to blow whistles and ring alarms.

You can find the monitoring network information at http://cemp.dri.edu/cemp/. Visit the site to get real-time weather — and gamma and solar radiation readings — in a community near you.