Answer to Question #2551 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

Q

What particular fields should we focus our preventions to protect the people working at the airport since there are so many threats to consider. Military men as well as Port Authority Police are strapped with masks. My screeners would like some input to protect themselves.

A

I don't know that I can assess the likelihood that an airport will be subjected to a radiological or nuclear attack, so it wouldn't be appropriate to try to help you decide that matter. However, what I CAN do is to perhaps help determine what gear you might need in the event that any particular airport experiences such an attack, and you'll have to decide where the threat is high enough to warrant the extra measures.

In case of a dirty bomb attack, radiation levels are likely to be relatively low and we are primarily concerned with contamination. That being the case, the same gear used to protect against chemical or biological hazards will also suffice for radiation contamination controls - gloves, a filtered face mask, shoe covers, and tyvek or other over-clothing. Or, if a person is contaminated, they should change their clothes when they are removed from the contaminated area. The bottom line is that we're trying to keep the contamination off of a person and out of their lungs, just as with biological or chemical agents.

In case of a nuclear explosion at some distance we are again primarily concerned with contamination from fallout. For a nearby nuclear explosion, protective clothing won't do much - you need to be sheltered from the effects of the blast.

To detect radiation exposure or radioactive contamination, either personal monitoring devices (dosimeters such as film badges) will let you know if a person has received a high radiation dose. A hand-held detector such as a Geiger counter can be used to find most radioactive contamination, but they are sometimes not easy to interpret because natural radiation levels are sometimes considered evidence of contamination until the screener has a good understanding of the instrument.

So the short answer is that the same safety measures should work for chemical, biological, or radiological agents, although different equipment is needed to check for radiological agents if their presence is suspected.

Andrew Karam, CHP, PhD