CSX Tunnel Fire (Baltimore, MD - July 18, 2001) » Lessons Learned

Issues	Comments
Media Relations	Designate a Public Information Officer for the duration of the incident. This incident occurred in the afternoon, and by the 5:00 p.m. newscasts, a PIO was still not available. According to Incident Command, inaccurate reports were made regarding the seriousness of the situation.
Maintain Control of “helpers”	Incident Command must maintain control of mutual aid and volunteer resources responding to incident. A few times during the initial incident coordination, volunteer response and representatives from City services left the IC staging area and had to be located for certain tasks to be accomplished.
Maintain Control of Workers	Accountability for personal safety and safe operations is a must during incident response and duration. Incident Command was able to maintain control and accountability of firefighters responding to the scene. As a result, there were no injuries to personnel (other than heat-related) and manpower resources were properly maintained to meet the needs of the incident.
Tactical Response and SOP’s	City management should review and update strategy and SOP tactics for response to tunnel incidents. IC recommends that other cities with a railroad industry collaborate to be successful and comprehensive.
Training and Drills	Expand use of drills and training along with the relationships with the partners involved in response. The value of training and drills cannot be expressed enough. The “what if’s” should include the worst-case scenarios and most complicated response needs. The BFD believed they would remain prepared to respond to incidents of this type and scale with continued training and drills for the entire infrastructure.
Partnership	Develop strong working partnerships with agencies and businesses responsible for responding to incidents. The BFD acknowledges that the incident response was successful because they had established working relationships with other City resources and businesses and industries in their area.
Incident Management System	Expanding on the partnership lesson, this incident demonstrates the importance of training and pre-planning. By instituting pre-defined plans for response that were developed with flexibility to expand during an incident, the partners were able to reach consensus on appropriate response tactics and ultimately expand the operations into a Unified Command Structure.
Emergency Management Plan	The BFD noted that the City’s emergency management plan needed to be reviewed and revised to incorporate technologies, safety, health and environmental impact, and other issues. Major incidents in any city present an opportunity to test under actual circumstances what works well, and what needs improvement insofar as emergency management plans are concerned.
No Serious Injuries	Adherence to Incident Command decisions and cooperation, contributed greatly to a low number of injuries–only two, which were heat-related.

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