PPG Receives TRANSCAER Individual Achievement Award

PPG has earned the Transportation Community Awareness and Emergency Response (TRANSCAER) Individual Achievement Award for helping communities develop emergency response strategies for coping with hazardous material transportation incidents.

PPG’s Sharon Piciacchio, general manager, chlor-alkali and derivatives, and Pete Breski, global supply chain compliance specialist (left), accept the TRANSCAER award from Frank Reiner, vice president of storage and transport, The Chlorine Institute.

"Communities throughout the country have truly benefited from your expertise in hazardous materials awareness and emergency preparedness," wrote Bill Macready, National TRANSCAER chairman, in a letter to PPG's Pete Breski, global supply chain compliance specialist, Pittsburgh. TRANSCAER is a voluntary national outreach effort designed to assist communities prepare for and respond to a possible hazardous material transportation incident. TRANSCAER members consist of volunteers from the U.S. chemical manufacturing, transportation, distributor, and emergency response industries, as well as the government.

TRANSCAER praised PPG's participation in the Norfolk Southern Railway’s regional "Whistle Stop Tours" that feature a specially equipped train with railcar "classrooms" for increasing awareness and emergency preparedness. Last fall, Breski, Duane Carpenter and Kevin Whyte, both engineers at PPG's Natrium, W.Va., chemicals plant, participated in a Whistle Stop Tour that began in Baltimore, Md., and ended in Cincinnati, Ohio, with stops in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio.

In a five-day span, the PPG trio helped to train more than 1,000 government officials, state and local emergency planning committee members, local emergency responders, contractors and employees on how to handle chlorine safely, identify common leak points in railcars, and proper mitigation procedures to use while waiting for additional emergency response assistance to arrive, Breski said.

Pete Breski, Duane Carpenter and Kevin Whyte are pictured with the Chlorine Dome cutaway on the Norfolk Southern Railcar training trailer.

For more information about the Whistle Stop Tour, visit http://www.chlorineinstitute.org/ or http://www.transcaer.org/public/home.cfm.

Click here to see the TRANSCAER award letter.