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Northwest officials are preparing in case a radiological event should occur anywhere in the world. Their task would be to detect it, understand what it is and where it came from and tell the public how to respond.
Here are the worrisome scenarios – a radioactive release from Ukraine’s damaged Chernobyl waste site, which Russian troops now occupy. Or worse, a nuclear bomb.
Officials in Oregon and Washington are at a heightened level of readiness.
Mark Henry leads the Radiological Emergency Preparedness and Response team of the Washington State Department of Health. He says some of the ways they are preparing: supplies, radioactive contamination survey instrumentation, and air samplers.
“When I’m talking supplies, I’m talking smears for actually taking deposition samples, I’m talking containers for milk samples or water samples …,” Henry said.
Henry says about 75 people at Washington’s Department of Health specialize in radiological problems.