The Emergency Response Teams (ERTs) in the middle region of Taiwan have continued operation in 2011 with two locations: at TaiChung’s Central Taiwan Science Park (Taichung CTSP Team) and Yunlin’s Douliou Industrial Park (Yunlin Team). This project employed the trained thirty-two responders on duty 24 hours all year round with three or more at any instance to provide services: prevention measures of manufacturer visit and consultation, unannounced tests on response plan, promotion/education/case-studies, training and field exercises as daily operation; emergency responses of on-site consultation, field monitoring and sampling, control and containment of environmental pollution, decontamination, site restoration and incident review. The purpose is to lessen the effects or impacts of releasing toxic chemicals to our environment during hazardous material (HAZMAT) events.. This project was completed 100% of requirements in order to service our central region of seven counties and city of Taichung, Changhua, Nantou, Yunlin, Kinmen, Chiayi, the teams responded to 37 events (with 16 simulation exercises) to lower environmental hazards and to strengthen environmental monitoring and response capacity. Besides, two ERT teams also assisted in 64 site visit and consultation of manufacture plants, in 34 unannounced tests for toxic chemical operation, in 65 reviews of emergency response plans for local environmental protection bureaus, in 9 regulation promulgation/education workshops, and in 12 field exercises with various local governmental agencies. This project also hosted two governmental agency-training, two mutual aid training and two experience sharing meeting with representative of Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency (TEPA). And, this project also helped to collect the information for 541 scenarios of high risk plants operating in industrial parks. In addition, this project also hosted an international experience exchange workshop with other project (Mr. Eugene Y. Ngai and Mr. Terry Lee Rockwell) in September. Two mutual support teams (Formosa Petrochemical and Chiang-Pen Transportation Corporation) still continued the supports to this project with new members of Mutual Aid Association of CTSP to strengthen the mutual aids in the region and to facilitate the capacity of HAZMAT response.

Toxic Chemicals, Emergency Response Team, Central Region of Taiwan