Environmental Officer Health Risks

There is increasing understanding across America of the significant risks run by officers involved in raids on clandestine meth labs. Many officers have stories of everybody running into a house, and then everybody turning around and running out, hacking and coughing. More enlightened jurisdictions now have their officers conduct raids in some sort of protective suiting and self-contained breathing apparatus. Others, and too many in Texas, still do business the old fashioned, macho way: hold your breath and run in with guns drawn. As illness among officers involved in these raids has increased in the United States, so have the health claims against their jurisdictions ... and so have the rejections of these claims by insurance companies. It remains virtually impossible to prove in court than a particular illness is related to running into meth labs, as there are few long-term studies on exposure to the particular chemicals involved. Or as a recent MSMBC story concluded: take a bullet for the city and you'll be taken care of (sort of); take some chemicals and "good luck." I mention this because so many environmental enforcement officers, because of their special knowledge of chemical risks, spend too much time in too many meth houses.

But risks are not all confined to the closed confines of a meth house. Risks may also be encountered in investigating routine dump sites, sometimes where chemicals have been dumped and other times where there is no apparent danger ... until the hacking starts later than evening. Not all dangers are apparent, and, what's worse, we all get complacent. But I suspect that the difficulty in establishing a link between meth chemicals and illness will be far easier than establishing a link between illness and some stray chemical encountered in a dump somewhere.