By Jim Mimiaga

A poisonous-gas release last Friday at the county landfill that seriously injured two people and affected 12 others has officials scrambling to determine how the highly toxic grain fumigant made it into the garbage facility.

What should be done to better protect landfill workers exposed to illegally discarded hazardous materials is also being re-evaluated by the county. Likewise, Southwest Memorial Hospital will revamp its own hazardous-materials procedures in order to prevent further contamination during such an emergency. Six ER staff members were exposed to the poisonous gas while attending to the two seriously affected landfill employees, who drove themselves to the hospital. The two have since been released and are recovering.

Six other landfill workers who were exposed to the gas were not seriously injured.

Figuring out where exactly the four containers filled with a concentrated gas of insecticide were dumped for collection, and by whom, is no easy task and could take months, officials report. Nevertheless, investigators at the landfill are narrowing the possibilities by evaluating waste-collection logs and analyzing the locale of the fumigant in relation to the "garbage stream" inside bays where trash is first compacted and then baled before being buried.

"We believe that it may have been dropped into a random dumpster somewhere and then picked up by one of three commercial trash collectors that utilize the landfill," said Deb Barton, Montezuma County Landfill manager, yesterday.

Waste Management, the City of Cortez, and Mesa Verde’s Aramark are the three commercial garbage-collection companies utilizing the landfill.

The containers were hidden inside a large cardboard box that was among commercial garbage being machine-baled when they ruptured, releasing the toxic gas. Workers routinely sift through garbage and discard any hazardous or inappropriate material, such as tires, batteries, or chemicals that can harm the environment if not dealt with properly, mainly through incineration. Trash being dumped by private citizens that day had been diverted elsewhere and is likely not the source, Barton said.

The incident prompted an emergency evacuation and temporary closure of the facility for chemical clean-up by an environmental hazardous-material company.

"We are narrowing it down to determine what point in the processing the material had reached, and which truck that material had arrived in. From that we can begin to pinpoint which route it was picked up from and then go from there," Barton explained. Trash surrounding the box with the gas containers is also being analyzed for clues.

The comprehensive investigation is being conducted by the sheriff’s department in conjunction with landfill employees, commercial garbage-collection companies, investigators from the Colorado State Patrol Hazardous Materials Division, and Colorado Health and Environment regulators.

Being prepared to handle emergencies involving poisonous-chemical accidents and spills is paramount to community safety. Those procedures are rehearsed from time to time at Southwest and the county landfill, officials reported. But deficiencies in how those policies are carried out was revealed during the emergency and resulted in more people being unnecessarily exposed to the sickening agent, which in extreme cases can be fatal.

For instance, hospital employees and the ER were contaminated because the two men were not immediately quarantined once it was determined they had been exposed to dangerous chemicals still lingering on their clothing. On the other hand, the county landfill did not inform Southwest Memorial of the incoming patients in time for them to react accordingly, and did not decontaminate the workers "on-site" before they left for the hospital.

"Certainly there were some things that we could have done better, the big one being that we contaminated our own people," said Bob Peterson, CEO of Southwest Memorial. "We are working to change the procedures so that next time we will be a whole lot more careful and prepared, so in that sense we learned a valuable lesson."

Ideally the two would have been quickly isolated and then given medical attention by a team wearing protective suits and air filters, Peterson said. Instead nurses and doctors were so concerned about the patients that they overlooked their own vulnerability to the poisonous gas. Employees were required to be washed down in a special decontamination tent set up outside the building. None were affected beyond headaches as a result of contact with the synthetic chemical gas.

"We are at the mercy of whoever comes in to tell us what they have got," said Southwest’s safety director, Chris Rubino. "What we will do differently is to have our staff register patients who they suspect are contaminated outside in order to avoid further problems and to protect the ER. Plus, there needs to be better communication beforehand; once we got the call, the two were already in-house."

Barton said that "there is always room for improvement" when it comes to emergency procedures, and acknowledged that the call should have been put in earlier to the hospital concerning the incoming patients. Meetings are planned between the landfill, hospital, county, law enforcement and the Local Emergency Planning Committee to work out the details of a more comprehensive plan that puts everyone on the same page.

One solution would be to purchase a portable decontamination tent for the landfill to use on-site during such an emergency. The landfill has "decon" showers but they were ineffective in this case since they’re located inside the building. Six other landfill employees breathed in the gas after it had passed through the facility’s ventilation system and were treated at the scene by Southwest EMTs.

Meanwhile the investigation continues for the culprit who illegally dumped the toxic gas, called chloropicrin.

Barton speculated that it was thrown away by mistake or out of ignorance, pointing out that farmers understand the dangers of the chemicals they use, and know that they must be discarded using a certified environmental chemical-disposal company.

"If someone did this out of pure ignorance I would hope they would come forward and say, ‘Boy, did I mess up, I didn’t realize the dangers,’" she said, adding that confusion may have arisen from conflicting messages on the containers -- one side read: "Safe and easy to use," while the other stated: "Poison."