Abstract -- The treatment of pollution from incidents involving toxic substances is usually one of the most difficult tasks among the post-incident tasks. The treatment must be prompt and allowed no delay to reduce the impact on the nearby environment. In the past, the task is usually delayed owing to lack of clear indicators and methods of treatment, and/or the company with incident lack of the capability to complete the task of post-incident pollution treatment.
The Environmental Protection Administration has contracted the EPA/NKFUST Southern Center for Emergency Response of Toxic Substance (ENSERTS) the project “The Study of Post-Incident Environmental Pollution Prevention Planning and Action Mechanism – Toxic Substance Treatment Technology” for the purpose of improve and enforce the post-incident environmental pollution treatment tasks. The project first established an incident classification method based on the operation and potential incident types of toxic substance. The project then goes on to establish standard operation procedures for post-incident environmental pollution prevention actions and clean-up indicators for toxic substances with slow toxicity and slow decomposition rate.
The project has completed on schedule. The tasks completed in this final report include: established incident classification method, established standard operation procedures of post-incident environmental pollution prevention actions for nine toxic substances: dichlorobenzidine, acrylonitrile, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, dibromoethane, ethylene oxide,tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene. The indicators for treatment of post-incident pollutions for these nine compounds were also established. The report also included three real incidents from the ENSERTS and two incident from the literature to support and verify the procedures established in this project. On November 2002, three Workshops were also held at northern, central, and southern Taiwan districts for demonstrating the use of the standard operating procedures. Various comments on the standard operating procedures were received and included in the final version of the report. Finally, the report included a section on the role of current incident prevention planning for local government. Recommendations were made such that future post-incident environmental pollution prevention actions can be improved.