Narrated by Greg Noll, Chair of the National Fire Protection Association Hazardous Materials Committee, the series will consist of three programs, “Incident Management,” “Organizing the Response,” and “The EOC & Crisis Management.” The programs were shot over a period of six days under the direction of Gordon Massingham.

The goal of the series is to provide industry with a guide for organizing incident management that will be compliant with the National Incident Management System. “This is important,” Massingham says, “because if you have an incident that exceeds the capability of your in-house response team, or if your plant is victimized by an outside event like a hurricane or flood, you need to be able to work with outside response agencies. To do that, you need to know how the game is played and who the players are.”

Massingham is enthusiastic in his praise of RTFC. “They are a highly professional organization with unique skills honed to deal with the very specific challenges of the petrochemical industry. So we feel quite fortunate to be able to work with them again.”

RTFC history
RTFC was established in Corpus Christi in 1948, in the wake of the Texas City Disaster, and today is the largest non-profit industrial firefighting group in the United States. RTFC provides state-of-the-art fire protection, prevention, inspection, hazard mitigation, training and technical support services and has responded to thousands of fires, hazardous materials releases, rescues and medical emergencies throughout the oil, petrochemical, pipeline and port facilities of its members.

Shooting took place at RTFC’s $5.5 million training center that has trained firefighters from all over the world, as well as at various Corpus Christi plants. Massingham points out that fire chiefs always approve their fire department’s participation in an EFG shoot, but usually spend their time attending to other business while junior officers work with the production team. But in this case, both RTFC Fire Chief Geoffrey Atwood and Assistant Fire Chief John Lowe were actively involved with the shooting. “That adds a level of authority and expertise that’s difficult to re-create,” says Massingham.

Among the scenarios that the Emergency Film Group crew shot were fires, hazmat responses, small incident command operations, EOC operations, and unified command scenarios featuring, in addition to RTFC, Port of Corpus Christi Police, Texas General Land Office, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and industry personnel.

Previous collaborations
Previously RTFC had teamed with Emergency Film Group on Petroleum Storage Tanks, Cylinders, and Industrial Incident Management. It was also one of a number of agencies from different parts of the country to collaborate on Hazardous Materials: Managing the Incident, based on the best selling textbook of the same name.

RTFC has over 100 full time firefighters who are highly trained in industrial, storage tank, structural, and marine firefighting. They also carry out hazardous materials responses, emergency medical responses, and technical rescue operations. They protect over seventy individual facilities that are owned by eighteen different corporations.

David Herr, the RTFC Public Information Officer, handled the production for RTFC with Assistant Director and Producer Michael Cataldo supervising operations for the film crew. Jim Simeone was director of photography.