Hands-on HazMat Drills – Stop the leak!

A Hazardous Materials Response team may be faced with many challenges.  One of those challenges is stopping a dangerous chemical leak when no other options are available.

The HazMat team going downrange in the hot zone to ‘stop that leak’ may face physically demanding and challenging manipulative tasks while also wearing hot, humid, and cumbersome PPE.  The only way to be proficient for this ‘career’ call is to train, train, and train again.  Hands-on, realistic training is key to becoming proficient at HazMat emergency response.

To train your team, it is important to make the evolutions safe yet demanding and stressful yet fun.  The team at HazSim conducts hands-on training evolutions across the US and Canada.  

‘Every year, we incorporate realistic scenarios and manipulative evolutions to challenge the students and leave them with both skills for their success and safety and ideas to take back to their own team,’ says Bill Bennett of Safety Systems Inc.

An evolution used in the ‘head to head’ competition known as the HazSim Challenge involved ‘stopping a leak.’

According to Team HazSim: ‘This is a great dexterity drill for your hazmat team. Simple to make and fairly inexpensive.’   What makes the drill tough is the tight working area inside the milk crate, as seen in the below pix.  For further information, check out more from the HazSim Challenge.  Here is also a video from a HazSim Challenge at VA Beach.

More drill ideas: Lock drill, Chem Suicide Training, and more coming!

Dangerous jobs require hands-on interactive training
Phil Ambrose
Firefighter/Founder of HazSim

Equipment list:

  • 2-4 milk crates with sides cut out to slide flange ends through
  • 2 2″ PVC or galvanized steel
  • 2 flange heads
  • 1 gasket for flange
  • 4 bolts washers and nuts
  • garden hose connection to one end of the flange
  • 1 mini garden hose manifold with 1 intake and 4 discharge

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