> hazard teams would in fact have good reason to hose down/decontaminate an > individual... your analogy of a fire is not quite appropriate: You can > quite easily detect a fire - visually, thermally, and via olfactory senses. > Sure, I'll agree that you might want to hold a company responsible for water > damage caused by faulty sprinkers when no fire was present. > dangerous. In those circumstances, I would hope that they *did* take > whatever precautions were necessary to ensure proper decontamination. Having > the threat of litigation held over them, for only doing their jobs, is likely > to hinder their effectiveness at preventing or containing these incidents. Another important difference is that in a fire, you can (and usually do) flee from the building. In decon, you're penned in, held prisoner, etc., in the building or site to await mandatory decon: It should be noted that no patient should be allowed to leave the exclusion zone without undergoing decontamination procedures. ... to aid rescuers with identifying clothing (evidence) belonging to victims. After a victim's clothing has been removed and placed into an airtight clear plastic bag, the long CONTAMINATED tear off strip is... TOWARD A NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR COMBATING TERRORISM ... The victims' decontamination process entailed their being stripped and scrubbed down with a diluted hypochlorite (bleach) solution. Their personal effects (e.g., clothing, wallets, keys, etc.), considered both contaminated and evidence, were confiscated and sealed. Also, new laws are being passed to prevent individuals from holding government accountable for damage to personal property. Thus even if you could file a lawsuit for damage to a $500,000 rig, laws would likely prevent that from going through. Not to mention the bodily damage (e.g. scars on side of head from arc-over of main supply, etc. which can produce quite a bit of electricty before blowing out). And if you die because of decon, you won't be filing a suit, even if the whole thing was a hoax. Besides, with martial law, there's no recourse. Some have suggested some hoaxes are perpetrated by the gov't decon team itself simply to sell more decon since decon is often privatized, or that gov't agents (or industry) perpetrate hoaxes to to quiet civil unrest. In such situations, decon would be the preferred way for a gov't to destroy evidence (e.g. collect everyone's personal effects for incineration, so no pictures or other evidence escape). Radio jammers? If it was the maffia who hosed you down, would things be any different? Who would you sue then? -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org please, Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/false domain
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail