This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features Lindsay Sander and David Bullard discussing historical emergency response liaison efforts and and how they are deploying new technology to bring pipeliners, utility operators, and first responders closer together, ultimately improving communications and capabilities, strengthening relationships and improving the overall safety of the communities in which the industry operates.
In this episode, you will learn about BuxusTM, a new mobile app, and how it is beneficial to both the pipeline and utility industry as well as the emergency responder community that is being described as a game changer. Listeners will get a glimpse at just how much has changed in the response world since the liaison requirements were put in place, the expectations and needs of responders and just what is possible today given the advances in technology.
Liaison with Emergency Responders Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:
- Lindsay Sander is the managing member of Sander Resources, L.L.C., an innovation-driven consulting firm founded in 2005 and focused on the midstream and utility sectors of the energy industry. The company manages a range of issues for its clients through active participation in the development of industry best practices, technical standards, and regulatory rulemaking at all government levels. The company also develops, implements, and manages public awareness programs for its clients, including stakeholder outreach and program measurement. Sander has developed three mobile apps that support industry: Safe ExcavatorTM, DigiManualsTM, and now BuxusTM. Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn.
- David Bullard is a 25-year member of the fire service and currently serves as a Lieutenant and HAZMAT Training Officer with the Columbia County Fire Rescue (GA) and a Firefighter with Grovetown (GA) DPS. In addition, he serves on the Board of Directors for the Georgia State Firefighters Association, National Volunteer Fire Council State Director, Georgia Pipeline Emergency Response Initiative Board of Directors, and NFPA’s Working Group on Flammable Refrigerants. As an active instructor for the Georgia Fire Academy and Georgia EMS Association, David is constantly engaged with teaching live fire, leadership, HAZMAT, and Farm Machinery Extrication. Connect with David on LinkedIn.
- Buxus™, Latin for pipe, is a mobile application designed to provide critical information on pipelines, utilities, and critical infrastructure around the clock and regardless of having cell phone or Wi-Fi coverage. It immediately provides information needed by key stakeholders at the touch of a button before and during a pipeline emergency and creates a two-way communication channel between operators and responders.
- Read this article to learn more about BuxusTM and how to download it.
- PERI (Pipeline Emergency Response Initiative) advances the abilities of emergency responders to manage pipeline emergencies through improved training, cooperation, and communication.
- NVFC (National Volunteer Fire Council) is the leading nonprofit membership association representing the interests of the volunteer fire, EMS, and rescue services. The NVFC serves as the voice of the volunteer in the national arena and provides critical resources, programs, education, and advocacy for first responders across the nation.
- PHSMA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) ensures the safe transportation of energy and hazardous materials.
- Pipeline Right-of-Way is a strip of land encompassing buried pipelines and other underground infrastructure to to be permanently located on public and/or private land to provide power, communications services, and the transportation of energy resources.
- Upstream means upward, or where the product originated from. It can also describe the operation stage in the oil and gas industry that involves exploration and production.
- Downstream means the direction and area the product is traveling toward. It can also mean the process involved in converting oil and gas into the finished product, including refining crude oil into gasoline, natural gas liquids, diesel, and a variety of other energy sources. The closer an oil and gas company is to the process of providing consumers with petroleum products, the further downstream the company is said to be.
- NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is a U.S. government agency responsible for the safety of the nation’s major transportation systems: Aviation, Highway, Marine, Railroad, and Pipeline. The entity investigates incidents and accidents involving transportation and also makes recommendations for safety improvements.
- SDS (Safety Data Sheet) is a standardized document that contains occupational safety and health data. Chemical manufacturers are mandated to communicate a chemicals hazard information to chemical handlers by providing an SDS, which typically contains chemical properties, health and environmental hazards, protective measures, as well as safety precautions for storing, handling, and transporting chemicals.
- GIS (Geographic Information System) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data.
Liaison with Emergency Responders Full Episode Transcript:
Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 266, sponsored by Gas Certification Institute, providing standard operating procedures, training, and software tools for custody transfer measurement and field operations professionals. Find out more about GCI at GasCertification.com.
Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations.
Now, your host, Russel Treat.
Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Landon Gurley with Corinth Gas & Water. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.
This week, we are speaking to Lindsay Sander and David Bullard about using technology to liaison with emergency responders. Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, David and Lindsay.
David Bullard: Welcome.
Lindsay Sander: Thank you for having us.
Russel: What I’d like to do is just start by asking you guys to tell us a little bit about yourself. Maybe, David, you could go first. Tell us a little about who you are and your background.
David: That works. I’m David Bullard. I’m a Lieutenant with Columbia County Fire Rescue, which is on the west side of Augusta, Georgia. I’m on the National Volunteer Fire Council’s Hazmat Committee. I’m an instructor in the Georgia Pipeline Emergency Response Initiative program and also a board member in that initiative.
Russel: So, you’re a firefighter that knows pipelining. That’s cool. I’ve never met one of those before.
David: Maybe I’m a unicorn. We’ll see.
Russel: Lindsay, same question. Tell us a little bit about yourself and background, if you would.
Lindsay: Hi. Good morning. My name is Lindsay Sander. I’ve been in the business, the industry, as a pipeliner for nearly 25 years. I started with a major operator in northern Minnesota. I moved to Houston about 20 years ago.
Since then, I started a consulting firm by accident, literally, and have been on an adventure since then. We’ve worked in all kinds of capacities, ranging from policy development and rulemaking implementation, all the way to innovating different products and services to support our clientele. We love the industry. We love what we do. Every day’s an adventure for us.
Russel: It’s really awesome to have a first responder on and to hear a first responder’s perspective on emergency response. It’s an important subject. What I guess is the way to tee this up or to maybe start the conversation is to ask, what’s the state of emergency response and the interaction with pipeliners? What’s missing or needed or not working in the way that that’s done presently?
Lindsay: Russel, you ask a great question. Our industry does everything we can to keep the product in the pipelines, but we, in theory, are a black swan. In the event when we do have something go wrong, it’s usually catastrophic. There are some pretty significant ramifications.
Having those relationships and being prepared for it is just absolutely critical. We know that the first 30 to 60 minutes in an emergency is just absolutely critical in terms of mitigating the consequences and really trying to set us up for a successful response.
Historically, through the liaison requirements in both the natural gas and hazardous liquids code, we have a responsibility to liaise. The way that that has historically happened is that we hold meetings once a year, in a community setting, where people give a presentation.
We introduce ourselves. We feed them and give them some trinkets and send them on their way, hoping that they will go back to their firehouses and agencies and talk to them about what they learned during that meeting.
That doesn’t work anymore, for a lot of different reasons. One is that the communication channels have just changed. The demands on the emergency responders are significant compared to what we were 20 years ago and no less than where we were 5 years ago.
Really, the way that we need to work with responders, it hasn’t changed, but it’s evolved. We’ve been dependent on a system where we need the responders to show up in what I would almost call a manners issue. We want the responders to show up on our time, on our schedule, to give them the information. Yet, really, it’s more appropriate for us to show up on their time and on their schedule.
We really had to rethink the way that communication needs to work with the response community. That’s led us to the path that we’re on today, in terms of developing BuxusTM and outreaching in terms of how we can provide them information instantaneously now because of the new developments in technology.
Russel: David, maybe you could elaborate a little bit. I’d really like for you to talk a little bit about how the nature of the workload or the nature of the work for first responders has been evolving over the last 5 or 10 years. I really have no idea what that might look like.
David: As Lindsay said, traditionally there’s been a liaison meeting where maybe a representative from the department could attend, but since pipelines cross so many different jurisdictions, it may be an all volunteer department. It may be a department with minimal career staff, it could be a full career department with over a thousand employees. It’s hard for one model to reach each one of those. In every one of them, the demands of the job, the call volume has increased significantly over the last decade or so.
In the smaller communities, it just may not be a time factor to go to make the liaison meeting. If information is only given to one person that can attend, there’s not a good pathway to get it back to the other members of that department. That’s been a struggle.
When I came on, when I started in the fire service, if we were at a gas leak in distribution, it was almost like the gas company had cooties or we had cooties, one of the two. We didn’t go near one another. It was like, “Hey, you’re over there. We’re over here,” and there is little interaction. I’ve seen through some of the things we’re doing in our state with our GPERI program and initiatives there, we’ve built a good relationship with our distribution companies. We’re still working on that in places. The same thing is occurring via interstate pipeliners.
We’re seeing better relationships built with communication and interaction, but there’s still a struggle to get the message to everybody. When you’re looking at it, I’d say, from the pipeline operator’s standpoint, it is easy to get a message to all your employees because all of your employees are, I don’t want to say a captive audience, but they kind of are. You can get a message to them on your time, on your clock, on your terms.
When you start getting into outside agencies, volunteer fire departments, urban fire departments, suburban fire departments there’s so many different factors there. It is difficult to get people together to get a message to them across one single platform. You have to find some different ways to get that out. It requires different hours and different days of the week, and things like that that traditionally weren’t available.
Russel: A couple of things that I’m hearing in this. I’m trying to elaborate on the challenge. I really want pipeliners to understand what the first responders are up against. One of the things you mentioned is increased call volume. What’s going on to drive the increase in call volume?
David: Across most of the country, suburban areas and rural areas are growing. Even the urban areas are seeing increased call volume. We have an aging population.
A lot of departments are taking on additional missions where 10 or 15, 20 years ago they didn’t necessarily run calls for medical patients before an ambulance got there. That’s becoming more and more prevalent. Most departments nationwide now do that.
As your population in your area grows, as your population ages, you see more of those calls. That’s putting a burden on the system because it’s a growth, but we have to match the growth.
Russel: That makes sense.
The other thing you talked about, and being a guy that works in control centers I understand this, but one of the other challenges is these first responders are 24/7 shift workers. Anytime you’re trying to communicate with an organization that’s barely staffed to cover their shift, getting that communication to all those shifts and all those rotations, that is a huge challenge, man.
It is just because you’ve got people you don’t see for two weeks.
David: Correct. Absolutely. Then, on the volunteer side, you have to catch them on a specific drill night or training night. Then, if you do host an event and a third of them happen to have a ball game with their kid that night, you lose that third. It’s a very difficult audience to reach.
Russel: What’s required, guys? What do we really need to be able to collaborate more effectively with first responders as pipeliners? What does the industry need to be doing?
Lindsay: I think the first thing is they have to be open to change, which is sometimes a difficult task. We’re used to doing things in the same path, the same pattern that we have been for decades. Changing takes effort, it takes time, in an industry that is at critical mass in terms of our rulemakings that are occurring, all of the responsibilities that we now have.
In general, if it’s not broken, don’t try to mess with it. I think a lot of people believe now that we are in a broken state with the emergency response and something’s got to shift.
I think the first aspect of this is the awareness of it. Then, we start looking at the technology and what we can do to make it easier on responders to get the information they need and how to contact us because that’s what’s critical. They want to make that instant connection when something happens. The more we can educate them on how to get in touch with us in the event that that emergency occurs, that is the first step, more so than anything else.
Russel: David, anything to add to all of that?
David: That’s a great answer, Lindsay. There are two quotes that came to mind on this. I’ve done some stuff for a business. One of their corporate mantras is, “Be afraid not to change.”
Secondly, a quote that I love is, “We’re drowning in information, but we’re starving for knowledge.” I can Google pipeline responses. I can find things about pipelines. I can find pipeline incidents on the Internet. Google will get me there, or DuckDuckGo, or Bing, or whatever you use.
I can’t find specifics readily on the operators I have and what’s going on with them. There are platforms available out there that don’t really feed me the information. I want to know about my pipelines. I want to know about my operator and the relationship with them. What products do they have? What is their exact response model?
I was fortunate enough a few years ago to work on a pipeline response toolkit as a partnership between the National Volunteer Fire Council and PHMSA. We had to write it fairly generically. We didn’t write it for a specific operator. We wrote it for natural gas and liquids pipelines. Things like that.
At the local level, I want to hear from our operator and have a connection with them on their procedures. Where’s their response crew coming from? If a valve needs to be turned off by them, what’s their response time? What’s their plan? How do they want to integrate in my command structure? Things like that.
That’s the information that we need. With a direct delivery, virtual delivery, or whatever fits the bill that delivers that.
Russel: I’ve never talked about this on the podcast before, but having been a civil engineer in the Air Force, as a civil engineer in the Air Force the base fire department falls under your organization. I had a lot of opportunities very early in my career in the military to work very closely with the fire department.
I had no idea what the fire department did. A big part of the training and orientation is getting clear what are the assets that I am responsible for responding to, where they are, and how I respond to these different assets.
Being on a large Air Force base that had all kinds of industrial processes for painting airplanes, recoating metal, and all this kind of stuff, there was a lot of very specific detail in all of that. That’s the real key, that’s what the first responders need. They need the specific detail for the asset they’re responding to and the risk they’re coming up against.
That was always the toughest part. I’d actually roll with the fire departments occasionally and respond with them. You never knew what you were rolling into. All you knew is you had an alarm and you were rolling.
I guess, I maybe have a unique sensitivity to that that others might not. The need for that specific information is so very critical for the firefighters in particular.
David: It is. The type of pipeline you’re responding to, the product in it is really crucial because if it’s propane or natural gas, the gas behavior’s different. There’s a liquids pipeline, and to me, if you have liquids pipelines running through your jurisdiction, the amount of preplanning for that is way bigger. If I have a pipeline that’s near a wetland, or near a creek, near a pond, I want to go ahead and have pre-planned areas. Have a contractor come in and put a boom in place or things like that. When do I want to apply foam to this? When’s it too much to apply a foam to?
If you look back traditionally at incidents that have occurred, even though they’re rare, liquid events tend to put a longer burden on the local fire department than a gas event. Gas events may last a day or two. Liquids events could last…
Russel: Months.
David: …for weeks or months, right? At least with the local level being involved there.
Understanding your resource, your mutual aid resource, is what assets the pipeline operator has coming as far as contractors go. What are they bringing to town? They’re showing up with 500 people in 24 hours, where do we help them stage equipment at? Where do we help them get portalets at? Things like that.
From a planning standpoint, that’s massive. A lot of places run mutual aid into their neighboring counties or their neighboring cities. If you’re just using the current mapping systems that are generally available, if I log into it right now I can only see my county.
I can’t see the neighboring county where I run mutual aid to. If I’m on a pipeline right-of-way there and I’m not sure what it is, I can’t get any data because that’s not mine, which is frustrating.
Russel: I need to know what’s upstream and what’s downstream of the asset that I’m responding to or the incident I’m responding to.
David: Correct. Even to the point that I teach statewide in our PERI program, I can’t look at other counties in that platform because of their rules and regulations. It’s frustrating. I can’t come to XYZ City and show them on a map in detail what’s there. I can show them the public view but I can’t get good detail.
On the bigger part, most things that we run to are distribution incidents. They’re not transmission incidents. There’s not a good platform now, or any platform that I’m aware of, where you can see distribution. That becomes huge.
If I get an odor-of-gas call in an area and I’m suspecting migrating gas, I would like to know on a map where the closest…I can go look for right-of-way markers, but if it’s dark, or if it’s raining, or something, it’s going to be difficult to find those, even though they should be fairly visible.
Russel: Yeah, it’s never as easy to find in the midst of the incident as it is when you’re doing a walkthrough and you’re trying to find it. I don’t know why that’s so, but that’s definitely so in my experience.
David: I think Murphy has something to do with that.
Russel: Yeah, Murphy has a lot to do with that, I’m sure. What’s required? What is the solution to this problem?
Lindsay: Again, I go back to technology. What we’ve done and a lot of what David just cited as issues have been resolved and can be easily overcome.
I’ve learned a tremendous amount about emergency response in the last 18 months. As much as I’ve been exposed to the industry, have attended meetings, and even been involved in an NTSB investigation at one point, the responder’s perspective to this is amazing.
Obviously, they do it professionally every day and volunteer for it, but we really have learned a tremendous amount from them and the way they look at things. For example, it’s so obvious but they do a 360 when they get to any scene. They’re looking at everything around them. They traditionally have not been able to look at what’s below them in terms of what that may pose as a risk or what they may be responding to.
This tool now gives them that aspect in terms of being able to look at what’s underground. Then, you start extrapolating that. You may have corridors that have 3, 4, 5, even 100 plus pipelines in a right-of-way in the Corpus or Houston ship channels.
You have multiple different types of products. You have multiple pipes in close proximity to each other. You now can get instantaneous information about those pipes and know what products are being transported so you know what risk you’re dealing with.
It is a complete game changer. That’s what we’re being told throughout the emergency response community, is that what we’ve done and how we’ve approached this will absolutely change the game going forward in terms of pipeline response.
Russel: The 360 comment, that’s interesting. If you arrive at a scene and you do a 360 and you look at everything from ground level up, that is a limited perspective on what you’re responding to and the reality of how much infrastructure is underground these days and the nature of risk that infrastructure can present.
Lindsay: We’re starting to get case studies in different situations that have happened over the course of the last year. We talk about one that happened in Orlando last fall, where our tool wasn’t used, because, frankly, they didn’t know about it. They learned about it afterwards. Had it been, it would have saved.
It was nearly catastrophic in the event that someone drove into a hot zone. They didn’t know natural gas was there. The only reason it didn’t ignite was because it was highly saturated. We had one close call with that. On top of that, they had to close a whole major intersection and road area for more than 24 hours. Millions of dollars were lost, both in damages as well as economic development to the local community, because they had to shut down businesses and everything else.
Had our tool been used in that situation, A, you would have likely prevented the potential loss of life that almost happened. On top of that, millions of dollars would have been saved overall. The way that we can look at this, it changes perspectives very quickly. We’re learning quickly how much of a difference it can make, just by trying to advance the ball, so to speak, with new products.
Russel: If I understand correctly, what BuxusTM does is it provides me that local detailed information and supports the first responder to perform their 360 so that when they’re looking at their 360, they’re getting information about what’s underground related to pipelines.
Lindsay: Correct. And other infrastructure, for that matter. Not only are they getting a picture of what’s underground, they’re getting the contact resources. They’re getting a control room number. They’re getting SDS sheets. They’re getting basic instructions of what are the first steps that they should be taking, who they should be getting in touch with, etc.
Russel: In effect, what you’re doing is you’re curating a whole lot of information that’s publicly available. You’re curating it specifically for the first responder and to support their 360.
Lindsay: Exactly. We’re putting it in one place. They don’t have to go to 16 different company websites. They don’t have to go to paper. They don’t hope to heck that they’ve got a three-ring binder that somebody can find. It’s all literally on their phone or a tablet. They can touch it instantaneously and get the information they need.
Russel: I’m going to take a little pause for the podcast audience and let them know something that’s operating in the background right now. We’re recording this on December 21st, just a few days before Christmas.
David has a hard stop here in just a few minutes. His daughter’s been sticking her face onto the screen share that we’re looking at because they have an appointment with the big man to talk about presents on the 25th. We need to help David maybe get a little bit of an early exit here. It’s been quite sweet, I will add.
Lindsay: I was going to say, Ruby is the cutest kid ever. I’ve gotten to spend time with her at several conferences. She is absolutely the mascot of NVFC and is not only respected, but she is just a really talented, cute kid. It’s nice to see her smiling face this morning.
Russel: David, I’m going to give you an opportunity to do your final comments and get off to your important appointment that comes next.
David: I’m going to tell you, I use Ruby to help me teach in gas classes. This ties in perfectly to where Lindsay was just going. The ability to get a big picture in your incident in a hurry is essential. It’s needed information.
She said a 360. I’m going to say there’s eight sides to every incident, frontside, backside, left side, right side, top side, bottom side, inside, outside. There’s not a quiz to remember what the eight sides are, but there’s always something happening.
I gave Lindsay the example of if I have natural gas in a sewer. I want to know where the closest interaction between a gas main and the sewer is, to try to track back to where the gas is getting in. I use Ruby. She gives an example when I’m teaching class. She said, “Poop runs downhill. Air runs uphill.” That’s why the odor in the house may be the first indication you have a migrating leak somewhere in a sewer. She’s able to help me teach that, which is hilarious.
Russel: That’s awesome.
David: If it’s damage that has occurred either through corrosion, or there was a boring nick to a line that didn’t leak immediately, or somebody was excavating without having a locate and they just covered the hole back up and walked away from it and now we’re dealing with a leak a time period later understanding the relationship between the sewer and the gas mains would be huge.
I can go on my county’s GIS, I can see my sewers, but I can’t see the distribution maps. With BuxusTM, I can see the mains, and Lindsay tells me with permission they can get those GIS files. They can overlay the sewer on there. They can overlay water mains on there. Now, I can see the paths where they correlate where this gas is migrating.
As I said earlier, we’ve put a lot of focus the last couple years on migration of gas and odor fading with mercaptan. The more information I can look at, at one time to figure out where this gas is coming from or potentially coming from or potentially coming from, the quicker we can get ahead of this.
We can lessen damages. We can lessen the time we have streets closed, things like that, and preserve life, which is huge.
I want to leave one final thought on the success of good liaison programming. A pipeline operator local to us had a strike in 2010. They’re the only pipeline operator I’m aware of in the United States that allows trained personnel to turn off mainline valves on their system, with training.
They will come out. They do the liaison. They give a training on where the mainline valves are. They provide that.
When this incident occurred, they had just done the training in a county about two counties west of me. We had a strike in the summer of 2010. The upstream valve from the strike, that fire department was dispatched to the valve’s location to turn it off.
My cousin, Jimmy Yelton, who looks just like Jimmy Carter so I call him Jimmy Carter Jr. He showed up and, with permission, he valved that off. The local natural gas distribution company to where the strike was, went to the downstream valve and they turned that valve off.
In about 30 or 40 minutes from the strike occurring, this was reduced from a 20-mile isolation down to about a 5- to 7-mile isolation, which was huge.
Every operator can’t have people out operating their valves, of course, but the success of that liaison program, that they were able to put pieces in place very quickly to make this incident – I don’t know what to say about this because there was a fatality involved, so I can’t say the word better – but to keep this problem from growing more.
Russel: You mitigate and minimize the consequences. Whatever those consequences are, the quicker you can respond and isolate, the more you’re going to mitigate and minimize.
I didn’t even know that any pipeline operator would do such a thing. That’s incredible. That’s really cool. The idea, particularly on long haul transmission lines where I could have a first responder execute a valve for me because they’re going to be able to get there quicker, often, than I can.
David: You have to have training. Of course, it’s product specific. If you can’t let it overpressure, things like that. I think there’s certainly a benefit to it when it’s feasible.
Russel: Sure. I think you make an excellent point.
If you need to leave early before Lindsay and I finish up so that you can go take Ruby to see the guy in the red suit, then please. I don’t want to be standing in the way of the important stuff.
David: That works. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. I enjoyed this. This has been a great conversation. Maybe that mainline valve conversation could be something for the future. I don’t know.
I’ll get Ruby to explain to Santa how gas migrates through sewers, too.
Russel: [laughs] OK. Sounds good, David.
Lindsay: Thanks, David.
David: You’re welcome. You all have a good day.
Lindsay: Thank you. Merry Christmas.
David: Merry Christmas.
Russel: Lindsay, I guess the question I’d like to ask, just to wrap this up, is what would you want pipeliners to take away or know about this conversation we’re having here?
Lindsay: I think encourage them to really look at what they’re doing and whether they feel confident that the response community has the information that they need. We’re getting requests from responders every day on things. The requests are all not only reasonable, but they’re giving us great ideas about what to do next.
We’re on a fantastic journey here, but I can tell you the responders aren’t satisfied with what we’ve been doing. They’re hungry for information. They want to partner with us.
They have existing channels of communication. They have existing organizations, partnerships, and all kinds of amazing tools and resources that we can benefit from and we can work with them on to improve in order to make sure that we accomplish what we want, is to keep everybody safe.
We have an enormous opportunity here to establish some not only better, but improved and great relationships going forward to make a difference. I think everybody in our industry wants that. I think they have a great opportunity to take advantage of that if they want.
Russel: I think all that’s true and awesome. I’ll tell you what I take away from this, is that there is a disconnect between what the first responders really need and what the pipeliners think they need.
Certainly, I’m speaking from my own personal experience. I wouldn’t want to lay that off on everybody, but certainly from my own personal experience. Having some exposure to firefighting in some limited and dated knowledge about the details of that, this is a big “Aha!” for me.
I think I’ve got something major to take away, that what the first responders need is the information quickly to understand the threat so that they can go about mitigating and minimizing the consequences.
We, as operators, want them to be able to do that.
Lindsay: Yes, and you hit it on the head. We actually work with Dana Brown from the Houston HAZMAT team. Dana has given presentations with me throughout the country over the last year. I’ve had multiple operators come to me after that presentation and come back and say, “Oh my God, I’ve learned so much from their perspective.”
It really does open their eyes once they listen and have conversations with people like David and Dana or Jonathan Lamb in Florida, etc. They really see this from a different perspective. They understand why we need to change.
Again, it’s not going to take much. We don’t have to upset the apple cart a whole lot, but we do need to think about things differently and listen and pay attention to what the responders are telling us because what they’re asking for is completely reasonable. We’re completely capable of doing it and helping them.
That’s what we want to strive for going forward, is a really healthy, strong relationship with all of our emergency response communities.
Russel: Absolutely.
Thanks for taking the time out right before Christmas to get together and have this conversation. It’s going to be a few weeks, so by the time people hear this episode they may be well beyond Christmas.
Anyways, I do appreciate you taking the time. It was great to meet David and hear his perspective. I would like to get back together and talk about some of the other subjects in this domain.
Again, thank you very much.
Lindsay: We so thank you for the opportunity. We’re excited to be here. We’ll help you find responders. We’ve got them everywhere, but needless to say we’ll help you in any way we can.
Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of The Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Lindsay and David. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit PipelinePodcastNetwork.com/Win and enter yourself in the drawing.
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Transcription by CastingWords