Blue Grass medical staff and personnel from several other departments recently participated in a drill to test and train response to an emergency in the main plant.

“We held a simulated agent exposure drill to practice and polish emergency response skills,” said Jeremy Sayre, deputy operations manager, Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass. “The more we train for these unlikely events, the better prepared we are if something ever does happen. It’s all about protecting the workforce.”

The scenario involved an operator’s gloves being punctured by a contaminated splinter in the Unpack Area 2, where workers unload projectiles from their pallets and place them onto trays to begin their destruction process, Sayre said. Workers had to don their masks, decontaminate themselves and the affected worker, provide proper aid for the exposure, then exit the room into the hands of medical personnel. From that point, the medical team took over, assessing and treating the patient, the worker now replaced by a training dummy, transporting them to the Medical Facility and following decontamination and medical procedures from there.

“The whole point of the exercise is to continue to test and train people so that if there is an event, everyone knows what to do,” Sayre said. “We want our operators and any workers on the site to feel secure that even above our standard high levels of safety, all processes, procedures and personnel are in place to make sure they are well taken care of in an emergency.”

Multiple training events are held every year to plan, proactively train and demonstrate response capability.