by David Ball
Staff Writer
A dozen Jacksonville Fire and Rescue personnel on Monday worked more than 120 feet in the air, battling sustained 30-mph winds with nothing below them but the St. Johns River.
But after about 45 minutes of slow and steady progress, their rescue patient was lowered safely into a waiting Fire and Rescue boat. Sandy was going to make it.
“She’s a little pale, but she’s sand, after all,” said one firefighter as he carried away the patient — 150 pounds of bagged sand used during the training simulation at the Jacksonville Port Authority’s Talleyrand Marine Terminal.
The exercise tested how the department would respond to a call where a loading crane operator suffered a heart attack or other medical episode while in the control room, and the control room was stuck out on the boom of the crane.
No such incident has ever occurred at the port, and if it did it would qualify as one of the biggest rescue efforts at any of Jacksonville’s port facilities. As it turns out, the port businesses run a pretty tight ship.
“I would say that as much work as what goes on at the port, the number of (emergency calls) we go on are probably less than outside the port,” said Battalion Chief Gene Callahan, whose coverage area includes Talleyrand.
“I’ve probably been to only seven or eight fires and rescues at the port you would consider major over my 27-year career,” he added. “They have a pretty good safety record.”
Chris Couch, risk and safety manager for JaxPort, said the only major crane incidents on record include a fire that caused $500,000 in damage in 1994 and another small fire in 2005. They were likely caused by welding or other work, said Couch.
But Callahan said the loading cranes do not present a unique environment, as rescues to workers on communications towers are more common and usually more dangerous. Incidents on ships, he said, are what truly require unique training and preparation.
“Ship fires are what pose the biggest threats and rescue scenarios off of ships,” he said. “A fireman got killed in the line of duty in the late ‘70s, where he fell in a barge during a rescue.”
Callahan said he remembers a rescue attempt for a worker who died inside a ship hull due to lack of oxygen. Years later an explosion on a ship caught several shipping containers on fire, and port workers had to move containers so firefighters could battle the blaze. Then there’s the rare complications with hazardous materials.
“About 17 years ago at Talleyrand, some of the inspectors wanted to check a container that was marked with hazardous materials,” said Callahan. “We looked at the product sheet and it was some pretty bad stuff. But the guy was hell bent on opening the container. He said that’s exactly where people put contraband.”
But those instances are very rare, agreed District Chief David Rounds, who oversees areas in Northeast Duval County including the Blount Island Marine Terminal.
“Because there’s a lot of people at the port, we do run calls on the port but they are not specific to the port itself,” said Rounds. “Yes, there’s the occasional ship fire. Yes, the occasional incident with cargo containers. But the vast majority are the same variety we go to anywhere else.”
Rounds said even the busy traffic in and out of the terminals, especially along Heckscher Drive, doesn’t seem to correlate into many accidents that require a JFRD response.
“Really, there’s only been one (incident) in recent memory that directly involved a port vehicle, and it wasn’t that vehicle’s fault,” he said. “The rest of the stuff on Heckscher Drive is civilian traffic coming in and out of Nassau County and Huguenot (Memorial) Park.”
But the ports in Rounds’ district are expected to grow. The TraPac terminal at Dames Point scheduled to be open by 2009 is expected to add 192 acres of activity and 1,600 related jobs, while the Hanjin terminal scheduled to be fully operational in eight years would add another 170 acres of commerce and another 1,600 jobs.
While that would surely make the area busier with traffic and create more potential for emergencies, Rounds said he doesn’t expect it to strain JRFD’s current resources.
“The likelihood of something happening would go up by the virtue of the percentages,” he said. “If you build a new port and have an influx of people, odds are that’s going to generate some calls. Now are they calls caused specifically by actions the port’s involved in every day? Not necessarily.”