Time Saves Lifes with E-Plan
A highly secure, Web-based that is instantly equipping response teams with life-saving information
In most businesses, time is money. In the business of responding to oil and hazardous material emergencies, however, time also translates to saving lives and property. But until the development of E-Plan, emergency personnel frequently did not have timely information to respond safely.
Although federal and state regulations require chemical plants, refineries, pipelines and hazmat warehouse to submit emergency response plans and substance inventories, researching this paper-based data is a time consuming task. Consequently, numerous firefighters and police officers have died in the line of duty simply because they responded to situations without knowing the specific dangers of a hazmat call.
"Most agencies that receive hazardous material documents from industry store them in libraries that never see the light of the day," said Jim Staves, the preparedness and the prevention team leader of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Region 6. "It could take hours to get copies of information that can now be accessed in seconds on Internet."
Until 9-11-2001, oil and hazardous materials emergencies were primarily associated with accidents. But today, the potential for terrorist attack on chemical plants/refineries and hazmat warehouses has added another layer of concern for industrial facilities, emergency response teams and regulatory agencies. The possibility of simultaneously attacks on more than one facility compounds the risks even more.
When the world changed on 9-11-2001, the need to expediently automate the hazmat information system intensified. The EPA and the Texas Commission On Environmental Quality (TCEQ) initially teamed up with The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in late 2000 to develop E-Plan. By mid-2001, the revolutionary Web-based solution had already received an approval rating of nearly 90 percent from the Region 6 Regional Response Team (RRT). Today - EPA, TCEQ and UTD are accelerating usage of the E-Plan program by emphasizing its high level of security. And the system are presently up and running in many large communities at various sites in fourteen states.