The Lab Safety Gurus
Discover the secrets to enhancing laboratory safety without the hassle of navigating complex regulations and modifying established practices.
Tune in to the enlightening discussions led by the knowledgeable Dan the Lab Safety Man and infectious disease behaviorist Sean Kaufman. Together, they explore a wide range of lab safety subjects on a weekly basis.
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The Lab Safety Gurus
Mastering Laboratory Evacuations and Biohazard Emergencies
When the ground shakes beneath a lab, every second counts. Join us, your Lab Safety Gurus, Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman, as we dissect the thrilling, yet essential topic of laboratory evacuations, sparked by New Jersey's unexpected seismic stir. Through vivid recollections of the Virginia earthquake, we'll bring you eye-opening insights on the necessity of robust evacuation strategies, including horizontal and zonal methods, tailored for an array of exigencies. Encounter the gripping narrative of a BSL-4 lab where the blare of a fire alarm met with hesitation, a stark reminder of the pressing need for clear communication when every moment is critical.
With infectious patients and biohazards thick in the lab air, the right preparation can mean the difference between chaos and control. In this session, we underscore the life-or-death importance of swift, guided escapes and the life-saving potential of self-decontamination backpacks. Dive into the mechanics of executing focused drills that confront the formidable task of evacuating highly infectious patients. Alongside Sean and me, saturate yourself in the strategies that fortify lab staff to tackle any emergency with decisive action, fortifying everyone's safety. It's a masterclass in laboratory emergency response, illuminating the path to safety for those on the frontlines of science.
Welcome to the Lab Safety Gurus Podcast. I'm Dan Scungio.
Speaker 2:And I'm Sean Kaufman, and together we're providing safety insights for those working in laboratory settings, doing safety together.
Speaker 2:So, Dan, this morning, literally, I'm on another podcast. I'm doing a podcast for one of the clients that I'm working with and we do a podcast within the organization. And as I was interviewing the individual doing the podcast, up in New York, a person says to me I think we're having an earthquake and I'm like in New York. They said yeah, and as I'm looking at the news right now, rare magnitude 4.8 earthquake strikes New Jersey. Shaking fell across the northeast. That's breaking news right now. And, yeah, believe it or not.
Speaker 1:I had no idea.
Speaker 2:And so today, what I'd like to talk about, and this time, is laboratory evacuations. What do you do to ensure containment when the lab has to be evacuated? Now, I've got lots of stories, but I'm going to let you start right now. You tell me your thoughts, what do you do? Because I've got lots of stories on this one.
Speaker 1:That's a hard one and it depends on the reason you're evacuating. So that's I. Just. The earthquake story just gave me the chills of. You know, in Virginia we don't get earthquakes, but we happen to have one and I think it was centered in Washington DC. This goes back maybe I don't know eight, nine years.
Speaker 2:Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait wait. Hold on one sec now, remember, I told you I had stories. Yeah, let me tell you a story, because you mentioned it All right here's my story.
Speaker 2:You ready, and it's hard to believe, but Jacqueline can attest to this you ready, okay, we are at George Mason University in Manassas, virginia, and it is just about lunchtime and I say to people, because we're literally doing emergency response in high containment labs George Mason has a heck of a beautiful lab in Manassas, virginia and I say listen, we have to talk about earthquakes and everybody in the room, dan, laughed and I said no, listen, y'all are on a fault. When I did a natural risk assessment for emergencies, you're on a fault. And they laughed and I said well, this is what you do if there's an earthquake. This is how we evacuate. These are the things you look for. They laughed. They laughed my wife and I you know, jacqueline, of course we went to Chili's and we're sitting at Chili's and we've ordered our appetizer for lunch.
Speaker 2:And Jacqueline, sometimes when she gets nervous, dan, she'll, you know, she'll shake her leg. Well, the table starts shaking and I look at her. I say are you nervous or something. She goes, it's not me. And then the dishes in the back fall over and the earthquake that you're talking about yeah that earthquake.
Speaker 2:We were at George Mason University talking about earthquakes a half an hour before that happened and when I got back from lunch they were like you have to be the messiah or something. How did you know that was going to happen? I said, well, I, you know, I have connections. I arranged it for training. But that is a true story, dan, true story, you know I am a lab safety officer for hospitals.
Speaker 1:We're in hospital labs Almost all of our labs in my organization. They're either in the basement or they're on the first floor. And that day I happened to be in an office building across the street from our main hospital, on the ninth floor. That's when the earthquake hit and I wasn't sure what was happening. I thought a helicopter hit the building. It was swaying and I wasn't, you know, I just didn't have my bearings, having never been in an earthquake before, and I looked up at the chandeliers swinging side to side and I thought what on earth is going on?
Speaker 1:And it wasn't until a few moments later, when it showed up on the big TVs in the offices that there was an earthquake. So I go out onto the roof of the parking garage of this nine-story building and I look at the hospital across the street and everybody's evacuating the whole hospital. They don't know what to do. They've never been in an earthquake before and they are running outdoors and that's what they feel like they need to do. They've never been in an earthquake before and they are running outdoors and that's what they feel like they need to do. And I thought, oh, now we're going to have to add earthquakes to our emergency management evacuation plan because we've never dealt with one before and now we've had one.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel for the people in New York today. In New Jersey I hope people responded well to it. But evacuation and knowing when to evacuate is key. Are you in a facility that does horizontal evacuations to a different area? Do you do zonal evacuations where you don't leave unless your area is announced overhead or listed as being too dangerous to reside in anymore? There's so many depending on the facility. There's so many different possible ways that evacuations might be handled. But there are good things to do in an evacuation. There are bad things to do in an evacuation.
Speaker 1:It's definitely something for labs to know about.
Speaker 2:Well, I was really. I have to be honest. I'll tell you where I got my ideas on lab evacuation. It actually has to do with a gentleman by the name of Chief Burke Chief Paul Burke, I believe, is his name out in Boston and I was working at the needle in Boston and this was before it was up and running and the Boston Fire Department was working with the staff there to develop emergency evacuation strategies. And he calls me one day. He says hey, you know, I'm really upset.
Speaker 2:I said well, what are you upset about, chief Burke? He says listen. He says I'm having people who work in a BSL-4 tell me that if a fire alarm goes off, they're not going to evacuate. He goes and that's making me upset. I said well, chief Burke, I tried to explain to him. I said Chief Burke, listen, if you're doing an acropsy on an Ebola-infected monkey and somebody's popped popcorn in a microwave and it's caused the fire alarm to go off, it actually is an increased risk to have people evacuate as a result of a fire alarm than to stay and do their work.
Speaker 2:And Chief Burke said Sean, sean, you're not hearing me. And I said no, chief Burke, tell me what's going on. He says I'm not asking people to jump out of a 50-story building when a fire alarm goes off. That's not what I'm asking. He says I'm just asking them to get ready to move if we need them to move. And that's when I realized that there's a gap that exists between emergency responders and high containment or laboratory staff. And that's when we developed what we call the red, yellow and green evacuation strategies. And this is what I believe that laboratory staff need to be prepared for Three different types of evacuations. So, yeah, I mean, I think you've heard about these.
Speaker 1:I've heard of it. It is not something that's used in some of the organizations that I've dealt with, but I'd certainly like to know more about it.
Speaker 2:Well, in a green evacuation, it's just something like we had described. Maybe somebody has popped popcorn, smoke has gone. It's basically a fire alarm goes off and where you're at, you don't see any flames, you don't see any smoke. So obviously, what we would like for you to do is call a central office Hopefully somebody would have you'd have a central office that's being run 24-7 that would be able to pick up the phone and give you guidance. But if they, if you call that number and they say yes, we want you to evacuate using a green strategy. It's simply securing what you're working with. You're doffing your personal protective equipment, like you normally would, and you're evacuating the area and then you're logging and reporting the incident when you come back. That's what we call a green evacuation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:What do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm familiar with that type of evacuation different terminology. But, yeah, that makes sense, that makes total sense for a laboratory.
Speaker 2:A yellow evacuation is, let's say, that someone goes unconscious, or let's say that somebody has a serious injury, or let's say an earthquake shakes and the way that you enter the lab is blocked and you have to go out of the lab in a different way.
Speaker 2:A yellow evacuation is what we call a modified evacuation strategy, meaning we're not following our traditional SOPs but we are doing everything we can to ensure containment as we evacuate the lab, meaning we're leaving our PPE behind. We're making sure that what we work with in the lab stays in the lab even though we're evacuating the lab. Does that make sense, dan? Yes, yes. So even if somebody is unconscious in high containment, we teach people to take their personal protective equipment off and move them into an area that is outside of containment so that they can be managed or they can be treated by medical staff that show up on site. To leave the lab in a different way, you would remove your gloves and your gear and keep it inside the lab, making sure that, again, your ensuring containment is not breached as a result of your evacuation okay all right, you ready for red?
Speaker 1:makes sense. Yes, I'm ready get out.
Speaker 2:You have a. You have a. Listen. You have a active shooter. Uh, you have somebody that's come in the lab and is is hitting people with things or threatening people. You feel like your life is at risk. This is where containment is not kept. This is where you get out of the laboratory right away. This is where you have designated areas and a designated evacuation route so that you're not intermingling with other people. You don't have protection because you're wearing potentially contaminated PPE. This is also where, dan, when you have an earthquake, having backpacks near exit doors that are full of what you would need for a good decon, like a tarp, biohazard bags, hand sanitizers, extra PPE so that people could go to a designated area and decon potentially contaminated PPE. That is what we call a red evacuation when your life is at risk and you get out, there is a containment breach potentially, but you get out right away. Your laboratory staff, in my opinion, should be trained for green, yellow and red evacuations.
Speaker 1:What are your thoughts? Yeah, 100%. There are a couple other things I would add to that. Yeah, you need to have a designated. If you're going outside outside of the facility as part of your evacuation, you need to have a designated meeting place and all laboratory staff, from whatever particular laboratory you're in, need to meet at that place. So if I'm in the cafeteria of the building and I hear an announcement overhead laboratory, second floor evacuation I need to leave the cafeteria and head over to that designated meeting space because I don't want them sending rescue workers in to find me. Hopefully somebody's got you know. If you're working in a place where there's a schedule, somebody's grabbed the schedule and somebody's making sure everybody is accounted for. That's really important. When you're evacuating too, you don't want anybody left behind and you don't want rescue workers going in after people who aren't inside the building.
Speaker 2:I agree 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I always recommend that you have a primary evacuation route to get to that designated meeting space and at least one secondary evacuation route because, like you said, there could be structural damage and you might not be able to use that route to get to your meeting space, to get out, and sometimes you've got to get out, like you said, in a hurry. I make sure every employee, every lab employee, walks their primary evacuation route and their secondary every year and I document that. That used to be required for CAP accredited clinical laboratories. It's no longer a requirement, but I still make it happen and I recommend everybody that you do that, because I think that's part of behavior and muscle memory. If it happens and it's a real emergency you tend to forget things, but if you've practiced it a couple times, you're going to remember what to do and where to go, and that's really important absolutely one thing.
Speaker 2:one other thing, too, dan, is you know if you are a research laboratory or a laboratory that has a BSL-3 or a BSL-4,? Remember that those are confined spaces. So when a fire alarm goes off and there could be a wide variety of reasons fire alarms go off. Maybe there's an active shooter, maybe it's a shelter in place, maybe it is a fire, but here's one of the worst things that you can do. Maybe it is a fire, but here's one of the worst things that you can do.
Speaker 2:If people are in containment high containment, bsl-3, bsl-4 the worst thing you do is abandon them. They are on another side of a wall, dan. They have no clue what's happening in the building, and if they have a number to call and nobody's there to pick it up, they don't know whether to stay or go, and that could. I've talked to several scientists where this has happened and that can be an extremely scary situation. No matter what, if you have a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab, you better have somebody on the other end of a line whether it's a phone call or a radio that can give them guidance when an emergency occurs Exactly that can give them guidance when an emergency occurs.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, in our highly infectious disease lab, which is just, you know, basically it's a patient room that converts to a lab when we need it, we use an intercom system to communicate with those who are inside. But we also recently talked about evacuation and what we would do if we were dealing with some Ebola specimens and suddenly there's a fire in the laboratory. Fires are rare in the lab, although they happen more often than people probably think, but if it did happen this is what we were talking about they would have to evacuate and get out to save themselves. Containment would not be a consideration at that time if something like that should happen. So we figured out an evacuation route for them. There's a quick way to get them outside and they have to stay isolated outside where they are. But, yeah, they have to make sure that there's somebody guiding them to do that when it's necessary to do it.
Speaker 1:You don't want to leave them alone or just get hurt.
Speaker 2:Two things I mean. Two things I would add to that, dan, is get them a backpack for decon that they can grab on the way out of that exit. That way they can decon themselves outside. And the second thing I would recommend is, if you're going to do that drill in the lab, do it with a patient that's highly infectious, because how are you going to get that patient out of a hospital when an emergency happens?
Speaker 1:And that I mean, anyway, the lab bonfire. They're right down the hall from the patient room, so that's a problem. There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, hey again, dan, it's great talking to you. Thank you so much. And, ladies and gentlemen, just remember, you know, when you're looking at laboratory evacuations, there could be several different reasons, as Dan pointed out, several reasons. But if you can prepare your laboratory staff to evacuate for a wide variety of those by categorizing them maybe it is a green, yellow, red. Whatever your organization chooses to do, just make sure that you continue to train and empower your staff to take care of themselves when an evacuation or when an emergency situation occurs. We are the Lab Safety Gurus, Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank you for letting us do lab safety together.