This project aimed to set up southern environmental incidents specialist teams with one team each in Kaohsiung area and Tainan area. Each team has 18 specialist with 3 of them on duty at any time to provide round-clock on-site emergency response actions, monitoring, analysis and recovery following the commands from Emergency Information Center for Toxic Substances. A total of 23 incidents responded in the jurisdiction area. Among these incidents, 9 occurred in Kaohsiung City, 4 occurred in Pingtung County and 8 in Tainan City,1 occurred in Penghu County,1 occurred in ChiaYi County. This project completed the information sharing, chemicals monitoring and detection, assisting the response actions for operating companies, and integration, coordination, confirmation, reporting, and materials sourcing for emergency response center. The work done on the monitoring and analysis for environmental incidents included analyses of air pollutants and toxic chemicals, sampling, monitoring, weather information collecting, and thermal hazard monitoring by infrared camera images. In addition, 24 simulated drills of toxic pollution incidents were done to meet contract requirement. On the toxic incidents prevention and preparedness, 183 on-site visiting to operating facilities; 92 no-advance notice testing; 10 drills with local environmental bureaus by each team; 107 EPA assigned drills on civilian mobilization, anti-terrorism, and environmental incidents; 595 reviews of toxic incidents hazard prevention and preparedness plans, and regular inspection and maintenance of EPA allocated equipment were completed. Also 22 workshops on toxic incidents code compliance, 8 workshops on mobilization and joint response team trainings, 2 specialist meeting on incident case study and operating facilities of toxic chemicals for hazard analysis were held report.

Environmental incidents specialist team, emergency response, exercise for emergency response of toxic substances