‘Firefighters ill-equipped to handle nuclear fallout’

FIREFIGHTERS are ill-equipped and insufficiently trained to deal with a major nuclear disaster, the National Firefighters Committee said yesterday.

Chair of the committee Brian Murray was commenting on Ireland’s emergency planning after the screening by RTÉ of Fallout, a docudrama about a nuclear disaster at Sellafield.

“There have been no exercises carried out in the middle of a major urban centre in this country to see exactly how the fire services could deal with such an accident,” he stressed.

And while Britain has 80 instant response units capable of dealing with mass contamination, Ireland has none.

Mr Murray said attempts were being made to have a decontamination system available round the clock in Dublin but it had yet to be put in place.

The two-part drama series, which concluded last night, shows how Ireland might react to a radioactive cloud reaching the east coast after an explosion and fire at Sellafield.

Mr Murray said Ireland is not ready to deal with an accident or terrorist attack on Sellafield because the country’s firefighters have neither the equipment nor sufficient training to cope with such a situation.

“There is an obligation on the local authorities to have a major accident plan prepared but there is no obligation on the Government to audit those plans to see if they are capable of functioning in the event of a disaster,” he pointed out.

Meanwhile, the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPI) has described the nuclear disaster depicted in the docudrama as “not realistic”. After analysing the scenario as depicted in the programme, the institute found it also exaggerated the amount of radioactivity that could reach Ireland. RPI chief executive Dr Ann McGarry said the institute had long been concerned about the possibility of an accident at Sellafield and had conducted extensive studies to predict how such an accident could affect Ireland.

“The scenario envisaged in the programme is not realistic and exaggerates the amount of radioactivity that could reach Ireland,” she said.

She was also concerned that the programme appeared to suggest that evacuation would be the appropriate response.

International best practice indicates that evacuation is only ever recommended to prevent people suffering immediate health effects.

“In Ireland, due to our distance, radiation levels arising from an accident would never be sufficiently nigh to give rise to these effects,” she said.