A hazardous materials spill near County Highway N and Greiner Road in the town of Freedom, July 5, 2023. PC: Fox 11 Online
APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Hazmat teams were called out three separate times this week across Northeast Wisconsin.
It was a busy week for Green Bay and Appleton’s fire crews with calls for hazardous materials.
On Monday, two people were affected when an irritant leaked in a basement lab at Bellin Hospital.
Late Wednesday night, crews had to clean up an alcohol-based chemical leaking from a crashed tanker in Freedom.
“The other night we had the response into Freedom which was a tanker truck that had tipped over and they believed that there was a leak for some alcohol based contents,” said Alex Quintana, public education specialist with the Appleton Fire Department,
Thursday, a potassium hydroxide spill needed to be contained from a warehouse on Green Bay’s west side.
Quintana says the department’s Hazardous Materials Team worked to control the leak on Wednesday.
“And then stopped the leak and provided essentially a kiddie pool to collect all the materials coming out,” said Quintana.
Around 25 Appleton firefighters are qualified as hazmat technicians. Quintana says the department ran about 10 hazardous materials calls last year.
“We’ve run a few this year because we are a regional task force we do respond a little bit more outside the city as well, so we have a little bit more increase in call volumes,” said Quintana.
When it comes to determining the severity of a hazardous materials spills call, Quintana says crews will look for people to see if they’re up and moving around or laying on the ground, needing help.
“That’s an indicator that tells us what type of chemical it is and and what its effect are on people. If we have any information from our dispatch on what this chemical component could possibly be, we definitely roll with that, but we also verify,” said Quintana.
Hazardous materials can be anything.
“It can be in a liquid form, gas form, a solid form, it just kind of depends,” said Quintana. “Milk can be a hazardous material if it’s in a large quantity and in an unlikely area.”
Which is why the department has plenty hazmat suits and air tanks.
Quintana says it’s important to know the quantity of the material as well.
“What the concentrate of a product is can really tell us how bad an incident is going to be as well as the quantity, how much of this thing do we have and what are the effects it may have on us and on the environment,” said Quintana.
When it comes to every day calls, Quintana says the Hazardous Materials Team may be used more frequently than you think.
“Earlier this year we had a chlorine leak at a pool for a local gym and that we were on scene with that for about 14 hours and sometimes these calls are very lengthy and it’s not that we can’t do it fast enough, you just want to conserve energy to make sure that you are not spreading anything or contaminating anything that doesn’t need to be contaminated,” said Quintana.
For more information about what to do before, during and after a hazardous materials incident, click here.
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