The EPA is an agency within the United States’ government which regulates and enforces official policy on how people affect the natural environment. This covers a broad spectrum of responsibilities, as there are many different environmental concerns facing our world today. Some of these are the result of purely natural phenomena, while others have been influenced by people. Of that second group, one of the foremost on everybody’s minds is the ever-present potential for a catastrophic release of radiation. This would most likely be the result of a radioactive materials leak, whether accidental or deliberate (such as by terrorists detonating a “dirty bomb”), but there are other, less likely sources of contamination as well, some of which are naturally occurring.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Radiological Emergency Response Team, or RERT, was created to assist with the isolation and containment of radioactive contamination. Radiation is harmful to most living things; it is directly dangerous to human life, but it also has profound implications for the environment, and it can cause massive damage if it affects livestock — or gets into our groundwater. The fact that radiation can spread, contaminating an ever-larger area, makes RERT’s mission all the more vital.
Nuclear Contaminant Mitigation
The Environmental Protection Agency has several different teams available to confront environmental threats based on the release of radiation. RERT specializes in the confrontation of radiation released as a result of nuclear emergencies. Dirty bombs, leaking waste containers, and problems at nuclear plants would all fall under their purview. RERT has people who would be present on-site to assist with the initial phases of disaster response. Their job is to evaluate the severity of a release, to established recommended guidelines for protective equipment and contamination avoidance procedures, and to plan the public information and cleanup campaigns.
Administration and Logistics
RERT has the authority to act, in the event of radiological contamination, and to implement plans to protect the local population (if any) as well as to contain the situation. Before a plan can be implemented, however, it needs to be created, tested, evaluated, and communicated to other concerned branches of the government. Advance preparedness is important to the ability to take swift action; the team requires a sound, workable plan, and everyone from the Department of Energy on down to local law enforcement agencies needs to be aware of it. To that end, the Environmental Protection Agency has some of the leading experts on radiological contamination in the world on hand; they continuously develop, test, and update strategies on how to deal with different radiological releases.
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Advisement and Consultation
The Environmental Protection Agency is not in charge of every aspect of a nuclear contamination cleanup; other agencies are also involved. These include local, state, and federal-level government organizations, including the federal Department of Energy and the state Department of Transportation. The Radiological Emergency Response Team runs interference between these various groups, minimizing the risk of jurisdictional conflict and other forms of administrative confusion. They provide guidelines on the best practices to handle the materials involved, including what equipment should be used, and they assist in a broadly-defined support capacity.
The population of the United States enjoys some of the highest safety standards in the developed world. This is due, in no small part, to the constant state of readiness maintained by the EPA and its many specialized disaster mitigation teams, including RERT. These teams work around the clock to reduce the impact of ecological disasters, to protect the population from their effects, to expedite cleanup, and to implement procedures which make recurrences far less likely.