Training helps protect all of us

If you live in Baker City, almost every day dangerous substances pass within a couple miles of your home.

And considerably closer than that, if your address is near the freeway or the railroad tracks.

But we never see the toxic chemicals or other similarly hazardous stuff that rolls through on the road or the rails.

At least we hope we don’t.

Odds are, though, that one day some potentially deadly material will spill while a truck or a train is hauling it through town.

It’s then that our lives might well depend on the people trained to protect us.

Fortunately, those people are better able to do so today than they were two weeks ago.

A $12,000 grant from Oregon’s Hazardous Materials Emergency Preparedness Program, along with a contribution from the Randall E. Carpenter Foundation, paid for a training which about 60 firefighters, including many volunteers from the region, attended Sept. 13 in Baker City.

This is one of those rare cases in which the government spent our money on something we can’t imagine anyone would oppose.

Teaching our emergency crews how to deal with disasters is, in essence, a form of insurance.

And like all insurance, we hope we never have to use it.

But it’s comforting to know can can rely on it when we need to.