The Hazmat Courses at the University of Minnesota have benefited our programs here at the Minnesota Department of Health, Environmental Public Health Laboratory. As a laboratory with ~40 employees, it is very important to have a core of staff trained to respond to potential emergency events involving spills of hazardous chemicals. The training we receive from the University of Minnesota helps to ensure our goal of employee and facility safety is met.
As a result of the training provided, we have established our own outreach program to the hazmat community in Minnesota. The training provided in the refresher enabled us to reach out to our state agency partners to safety accept and handle unknown environmental samples; we would not have this otherwise.
Last year, after I attended your course, we had an incident in our office where white powder was detected. ( it is a police station). We revised our procedures on how the department handles white powder incidents, and they used the ERR manual as a reference guide for appropriate PPE and respiratory protection in emergency response. It did not turn out be anything of substance, but the training and manual guided us selecting the appropriate response for this situation, and averting something more serious.
As a result of the HOS training we received from you last year, we now have incorporated new procedures for decontamination of chemically exposed patients into our standard practice for emergency response. Our facility is the receiving hospital for Prairie Island Nuclear Facility. Many participants had not received training to this level in their practice before the course. It will certainly help make us safer. Thank you!