2016-06-02 Hearing Transcript - GAF Civil Defense

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In Iselle, not only did we not know. There was no siren. There was, basically, a friend of mine called me, was when I found out that the plant had a problem. And, it took as, you know, Darryl can tell you, the Fire people weren't able to get out. And, so, this sort of modeling will—will help the emergency response, and I would ask you to please do this because there are people in the neighborhood that will effect in a material and basic way. Thank you. BILTOFT: Good morning. My name is Chris Biltoft. I live in Kapoho Vacationland, and I've been working on PGV related issues for quite a few years now, and in collaboration with Dr. Businger on this project, and I'm very much in favor of supporting the, the modeling effort here. One of the basic problems we have at PGV is that it's a major industrial facility located in an urban cluster. In other words, there are people living right outside the gate, right outside the perimeter of PGV within a few hundred meters. And, these are areas where toxic gases can be released at PGV and pass through the residential area within a few minutes. You know, it doesn't take more than five or ten minutes for whatever is released at PGV to get outside the perimeter and into the community. And, that is the crux of the problem. We need to understand what conditions, under what conditions the public is exposed to these kinds of issues. Now, PGV will tell you that it's a closed -looped system, and they don't release toxic gases, and that's true most of the time. You know, 99.9 percent of the time that is true. However, that is not always the case. Seals fail. Things happen. Upset conditions occur. And, it's under those very specific conditions where we have problems. The thing gets away from them every once in a while basically, and we need to have Civil Defense to be able to respond in an appropriate way. We need the community to be able to understand what's happening and respond appropriately when these upset conditions occur. And, that's the whole point of this exercise—is to give Civil Defense tools and give the community some assurance that there's some program, a possibility of they being informed and being able to evacuate, if necessary, when these conditions occur. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about the monitoring program because unlike what PGV now has, a real monitoring program includes source sampling where you sample where the stuff comes out of the pipe. In other words, you need to know in grams per minute or some, something like that, what is actually being dispersed into the atmosphere. It's not sufficient just to have a few scattered samplers out in the weeds somewhere. You need to know what's coming out of the pipe. The other thing you need is modelling because you can take the grams per second, the source term that is, and put it into a dispersion model and get some idea of where the stuff is going to go, what the concentrations are going to be, and what the impacts on the community might be. So, sampling at the source, modelling—these are the two key components to a monitoring program. 5 EXHIBIT C