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The federal government offers no clear guidelines for chemical exposure from oil spills, leaving protection of the public in the hands of state and/or local officials when an accident does occur. There have been at least three oil spills from ruptured pipelines in the past three years, but each community handled each situation differently.

In June, 2010, 33,000 gallons of medium grade crude oil leaked from a ruptured pipeline into a Salt Lake City, Utah neighborhood. The oil leaked into Red Butte Creek and all through residential neighborhoods. There were no evacuations done. Many of the homes had windows opened, allowing fumes to seep into homes. These fumes can cause drowsiness and lethargy in people when exposed and many of the residents reported sleeping until noon that day.

A month later, in Marshall, Mich., a million gallons of heavy Canadian crude spilled into the Kalamazoo River. Four days later, officials finally issued a voluntary evacuation of residents.

In March of this year, 22 families were evacuated from their homes when 200,000 gallons of heavy crude leaked from a broken pipeline in Mayflower, Ark. However, residents who lived just blocks away in the same subdivision weren’t evacuated. The oil flowed and ended up in a lakeside community, where it is still being cleaned up. None of those residents were ever asked to evacuate.

Spilled crude oil is seen in a drainage ditch near evacuated homes in Mayflower, Arkansas.

Also at issue is the lack of studies to determine the long term health dangers from exposure to oil fumes. Many people who were exposed complained of headaches, nausea and respiratory problems after the incidents, and medical experts don’t know what long-term effects may appear years later.

Crude oil contains over 1,000 chemicals, many of which have been classified as hazardous to humans. One of the most dangerous is benzene. Increased exposure to benzene has been shown to cause leukemia and neurological problems. None of the federal guidelines about benzene exposure covers exposure from oil spills.

Despite plans to expand the pipelines by more than 10,000 miles - many of those miles in populated neighborhoods -  there are still no plans for the government to set chemical guidelines at oil spills. Nor are there any plans to conduct studies of long-term health effects on those that have already been exposed.

Emergency Film Group’s Site Management & Control is part one of the Hazardous Materials: Managing the Incident series. The film includes information on preplanning to set up a systematic, coordinated approach to a hazmat accident; procedures for establishing command; guidelines for safe approach and positioning at a hazmat incident; establishing the perimeter and hazard control zones; and procedures for carrying out protective actions. To learn more, read here. . .

The Federal Protective Service, (FPS), a division of the United States Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for the law enforcement and facility security for nearly 9,000 federally owned and leased buildings, courthouses, properties, and other federal assets. According to officials, the FPS collects $1.3 billion in user fees a year for this service.  But many of these agencies, including Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, are assessing their own security needs out of concern that the FPS is providing a service not up to the standards developed by the Interagency Security Committee (ISC).

The FPS employs about 1,225 federal personnel, most of them serving as law enforcement security officers (LESO), not nearly enough to physically oversee all the facilities that are within each officer’s region. And each officer is responsible for the training and certification, the risk assessment and oversight, and the patrolling and law enforcement of every facility. This shortage means that most buildings are left in the care of contract security guards, working by themselves.

There are there are approximately 13,000 contract guards from almost forty different private companies. The cost of these private contract guards will cost FPS $796 million this year. But the shortage of FPS officers and not enough oversight over the contract guards have produced numerous alarming incidents.

In 2009, investigative teams from Government Accountability Office (GAO) were able to get into ten high-level security buildings with the components for an improvised explosive device (IED). Once inside they were actually able to assemble the IEDs and freely walk around the facilities.

In February 2011, a contract guard found a bag at the McNamara Federal Building in Detroit. This building houses the FBI, the IRS and a U.S. senator’s office. Instead of screening the bag, the guard put in it the lost and found. Three weeks later, another guard decided to check the bag out through an x-ray machine. Inside the bag was a metal box with wires and other electrical components. The Detroit Police Department bomb squad was called in and detonated the material, setting off a secondary explosion and revealing a timer and other evidence confirming the item was a bomb. A suspect who had mental problems and a grudge against the FBI was later arrested.

Other reports of lax security include weapons passing through lobbies undetected, government property stolen and even one report of a dead body that went unnoticed by contract security for months. Critics say part of the problem is that the training standards and instruction are not consistent across the board. An example is the training of contract guards on the use of X-ray scanner and magnetometers, currently the responsibility of the LESOs. But too many times, that training isn’t provided because of the LESO shortage.

Professional Security Officer is a DVD-based training series for those seeking credentialing as a security officer. The training may be provided prior to initial posting, or may be part of an ongoing training program. This program has a wide application for contract and staff security officers, both armed and unarmed. To learn more, read here. . .

The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, site of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people.