Friday, Feb. 11, 2005 | 3:24 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
February 12 - 13, 2005
Al Smith, with a full gray beard and wearing jeans, looks as if he could star as a TV crime-scene investigator.
In real life, though, the analytical chemist investigates hazards in the environment.
Smith, a Las Vegas resident who is a member of a federal emergency response team, counts among his experiences time spent at the World Trade Center site just after 9/11.
After working days at ground zero in New York, Smith said he was called to the Hart Senate Building in Washington to respond to the arrival of anthrax in congressional mail. The Las Vegas team from the Environmental Protection Agency led that investigation.
"It was a combined case of a contaminated site and a crime scene," Smith said.
Both incidents leave him shaking his head.
"Hazardous waste sites are usually not located in garden spots of the country," Smith said with a grim smile.
While the federal Environmental Protection Agency has had an emergency response team in place for investigating such national contamination disasters for 27 years, the Las Vegas team recently took charge of a new tool to do the job.
A $250,000 mobile laboratory arrived at the Environmental Protection Agency Quality Assurance Laboratory in Las Vegas late last year.
With that unit, the team can respond to biological or chemical disasters anywhere in the nation.
The mobile lab was part of an exercise at Sam Boyd Stadium on Thursday with response teams and equipment from three other Western regions including Denver, Seattle and Las Vegas, EPA spokesman Mark Merchant said.
"We do these exercises periodically so the crews stay trained," Merchant said.
The crews need to stay trained so the Environmental Protection Agency's Emergency Response Team is ready and able to handle real-life calls nationwide. Calls the team has already responded to include floods, toxic spills and the space shuttle Columbia's breakup over the Southwest in February 2003.
Whether it is tracing anthrax, checking a building's rubble or tracking mercury contamination, the Las Vegas mobile lab is ready to go where the hazards are.
Las Vegas was chosen to receive a mobile lab when the EPA needed a location in the West for such a service, local EPA Director John Lyon said.
The other mobile unit is in New Jersey.
The mobile laboratory is part of Department of Homeland Security efforts to hone security skills in federal agencies while also improving the nation's responses to environmental and public health threats.
"All of the equipment would be too heavy to airlift," Lyon said, explaining that the mobility of the analysis unit is important. Basing the lab in Las Vegas allows it to take national highways to reach any potentially hazardous incident, he said.
Las Vegas is centrally located in relation to Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"It's the best story in the valley," Lyon said. "It helps the valley, but it also helps the nation."
Southern Nevada is also less seismically active than Los Angeles or San Francisco, but the lab would respond to a major earthquake in those cities or anywhere in California, he said.
"So Las Vegas is a place where you can get organized and leave from," Lyon said.
Each of the 17 members of the Emergency Response Team is trained in highly specialized technical areas, team member Roberta Runge, said.
The white van containing stainless steel laboratory equipment can detect, collect and analyze toxins in air, water or soil on a contaminated site, said Ed Gilbert, another Las Vegas team member. Gathering samples and analyzing them on site saves both time and money.
Sometimes the EPA emergency response team has to hunt for sources of contamination.
That was the case when team members responded in Las Vegas before the mobile lab arrived, helping local haz-mat crews clean up a home, an apartment and a school bus stop contaminated with mercury in 2004.
Smith also was part of the team responding to the two incidents of children finding mercury -- and then playing with the highly poisonous metal.
The first incident began when a home in the 1400 block of Saylor Way near Vegas Drive and Jones Boulevard had to be evacuated Jan. 10, 2004.
That cleanup cost $175,000 and resulted in a 17-year-old boy and his dog suffering mercury poisoning, EPA officials said.
Then in April, two adults and four children had to be treated at a local hospital after the mother found the children playing with mercury at the Eagle Crest Apartments, 5900 Sky Point Drive, near Ann Road and Tenaya Way.
The EPA and the Clark County Health District also investigated a school bus stop and a science room at the Lied school near Decatur Boulevard and West Ann Road.
In both cases, children found mercury in the belongings of an adult relative, opened the bottles -- apparently without the adults' knowledge or permission -- and played with the fluid element.
The EPA first established an Emergency Response Team in 1978 to offer expert assistance in cleaning up contaminated waters that threatened public health.
The Emergency Response Team has responded to more than 2,000 incidents in all 50 states, U.S. Territories and Commonwealths and 28 foreign countries, the EPA said.
The crews train constantly and learn how to handle equipment so that it is as familiar as appliances in their own homes, Lyon said at the EPA's main complex located on Harmon Avenue west of UNLV.
"You hope you never use the stuff," Lyon said as the crew loaded haz-mat suits, oxygen tanks and contaminant detectors onto the truck, "but if it is needed, it is ready."
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