HAZMAT Workshop combines book learning with intense simulation

October 10, 2011

Hazmat training is a staple at Cincinnati State’s Workforce Development Center in Evendale.

Firefighters, police and other first responders from the public and private sectors are among those who routinely enrollment in classes at the WDC designed to train individuals how to identify various type of hazardous materials, minimize their danger, safely dispose of them – and comply with the dizzying array of federal, state and local HAZMAT regulations.

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In the week between terms, the WDC offers a special 40-hour HAZMAT Workshop involving hazardous waste operations and emergency response. It culminates in a simulation of a chemical smoke filled warehouse. Participants are required to make their way inside, check for any people who might be trapped, then identify and contain a wide range of “hazardous materials” that require the immediate attention.

“We try to make this as realistic as possible,’’ said Brian Canteel, business manager(and Lead Instructor) for the Center for HazMat, Rescue, and Safety at the WDC. “We set the foundation in the classroom and our labs, but putting it into practice is what really seals the learning, we’ve found.’’

Canteel should know. He is a 16 year veteran of the Greater Cincinnati Hazardous Materials Unit (GC HAZMAT) and he literally wrote the book for this course – a 359-page manual, broken down into day-by-day training modules and crammed with worksheets and technical data.

Canteel and his colleagues at the WDC have outfitted part of the WDC complex to help make the training sessions as realistic as possible. One room in the back, for example, has a steel door, and Rick Ginn and Larry Gassert are old hands at rigging up a steel drum with portable smoke machine and a timer to fill the room and the one leading into it with dense layers of what looks and acts for all the world like real chemical smoke.

Participants in the final day of the HAZMAT Workshop suit up in full gear and pick their way through the dense “smoke,’’ searching first for victims, then following their training protocol as they try to identify what they encounter inside the room.
If you want hands-on education, Canteel says, it doesn’t get much more intense than this.