Sara Decair Has Been with the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Radiation And

NREP Abstract:

The Environmental Protection Agency encourages radiological emergency planners to use the most current protective action guidance available for radiological emergency planning activities while we are updating our existing guidance. The 1992 Manual of Protective Action Guides and Protective Actions (PAGs Manual) is still in use. A revision will be published for public review and comment this year.

Current guidance includes the 1992 PAGs Manual, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 1998 Food PAGs, FDA’s 2001 Potassium Iodide (KI) guidance, the Department of Homeland Security 2008 Planning Guidance for Protection and Recovery Following Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD) and Improvised Nuclear Device (IND), the federal 2010 Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation, the Department of Energy Operational Guidelines, and the Federal Radiological Monitoring and Assessment Center (FRMAC) Assessment Manuals. All these are available on the EPA web page, www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/rert/pags.html

In April 2010, EPA sponsored a full-scale RDD field exercise in Philadelphia, called Liberty RadEx, and immediately afterward began our response to the Gulf oil spill. Waste management work continues for that response. Lessons identified during the exercise and the response are informing continued preparedness efforts across the Agency and with our key federal, state, tribal, and local partners.

Bio:

Sara DeCair has been a health physicist with the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air since 2003. She works on policy, planning, training, and outreach for EPA’s radiological emergency preparedness and response program. She is the project and technical lead for revising the Protective Action Guides and is especially interested in emergency worker dose limits and turnback levels.

She previously worked for seven years with the State of Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality. Three of those years were spent in nuclear power plant emergency planning and before that she was an inspector of radioactive materials registrants and a radiation incident responder.