MIAMISBURG — You don’t have to leave Miamisburg to find the last major hazmat emergency like what’s going on in East Palestine. Roughly 37 years ago, in 1986, tankers full of phosphorus burned for days after a derailment in south Montgomery County.
Gary Rettig, Dayton Regional Hazmat Coordinator, said he remembers that emergency well. He has decades of experience. If there’s an emergency involving hazardous materials in the Miami Valley, his team will be there.
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“If it’s a material inside of a container and it gets out and reaches out and touches you and harms you in some way, the environment or a or a property, then it’s a hazmat,” he told News Center 7.
Rettig said what’s going on near Youngstown with the train derailment and hazmat fire is “very uncommon.”
“Statistically speaking, rail is a very safe way of transporting hazmat,” Rettig said.
His team of firefighters from all departments in Greene and Montgomery counties train constantly to minimize damage if something like this happens again in our area.
“We train on a lot of things, but a lot of our training supports what we would have to do in a train derailment type incident. You know, we might go over evacuation review, how we do mass notification, air monitoring, situational awareness or size up. So all those things contributed to contribute to what we would do on a train derailment,” he said.
Rettig told News Center 7 that Dayton Regional Hazmat trains 10 months out of the year for hazmat emergencies along railroads, at airports, on the highway and even residential and industrial situations.
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