Got a plan for staying safe if an environmental disaster strikes your town? This summer’s string of toxic emergencies — a refinery fire in California, a chemical blaze in a Baltimore train tunnel, explosions at a PCB-riddled New York recycling company — all sent plumes of hazardous chemicals into the air breathed by tens of thousands of people. These events raise an important question we want you to ask yourself today: Would you know what to do to protect yourself and your family if such an event happened in your town?
We’re not trying to be a pair of paranoid Chicken Littles here; just the opposite. Almost everyone lives downwind of a highway, a train line, a pipeline or a manufacturing facility where toxic trouble could flare up fast. Case in point: In August, an early-morning fire ripped through an electrical equipment recycling plant in West Ghent, N.Y. Local firefighters rushed to the scene but didn’t have the resources to immediately warn residents to stay indoors and shut the windows. Smart people did what the local fire company president now advises everyone, everywhere, to do: “Every citizen,” he wrote in an extremely frank editorial in the local newspaper, “ought to have his or her own plan for how to respond to an emergency. … Sitting around passively waiting for police or fire to arrive with detailed instructions on how to respond isn’t a winning strategy.”
