The Bulging Drum and the Night Manager

Recognize, notify, isolate, secure - and nothing that involves the container.

• Refuse the bung wrench. A bulging drum with liquid at the lid is a container under pressure, and 'sanitizer' in a food plant is very often a hypochlorite or acid-based product; mixing or decomposition produces chlorine or chlorine dioxide, which explains three people with burning eyes and headache at 15 feet. Opening a pressurized, possibly reacting drum next to them is a release-generating act, and it is product control, which is not an awareness-level function.
• Refuse to send workers in to read the label. Get the SDS or product name from the manager at the dock, or from the facility's chemical inventory, without entering the cage.
• Say the refusal out loud and simply: this is outside the training and equipment your crew has, and the hazmat team is en route. A manager who is told 'no, and here is why' is less likely to do it himself - but ask him directly whether anyone else has tried, and put a responder or a barrier on the cage approach so nobody does.
• Your deliverable is the perimeter, the headcount, and the notification - not the drum.

Treat the facility's assembly point as an accountability tool, not an isolation distance.

• A 25-foot evacuation point is where you count people; it is not a hazmat perimeter. Your exclusion zone is set from the product if you can identify it, and from the unknown-release recommendation if you cannot: at least 150 feet in all directions and expanded from there, biased upwind, with the cage as the center. Move the assembly area to that upwind location and re-count against the facility's roster - shift workers, drivers, and contractors included.
• HVAC: a running air handler in a 200,000-square-foot building can distribute an irritant vapor through the break room and the warehouse floor, or it can pull vapor in, depending on where the intakes are. Ask the manager to shut the air handling down from a control panel outside the exclusion zone, or have the IC make that request to the facility's engineer. Do not send anyone toward the cage to do it.
• Break room: it is adjacent to the cage, which makes it an exposure area, not a refuge. Have the manager make an announcement or call the extension, and move those occupants out along a route that does not pass the cage. Ask whether anyone else has symptoms - the three patients you have may not be all of them.
• Consider shelter-in-place only for a part of the building you cannot evacuate safely; do not default to it to avoid a disruption.

Hand off facts, not conclusions.

• Container: one 55-gallon drum, bulging for at least 48 hours, liquid at the lid, in a cage next to the break room. Product described by the manager as 'sanitizer'; SDS status unknown.
• People: three symptomatic workers (burning eyes, headache), their current location, and a confirmed headcount of the building. Break room occupants moved.
• Building: HVAC status and who controls it, dock access, cage location relative to the break room and to the warehouse floor, and the location of any floor drains.
• Atmosphere/environment: wind, temperature, odor character and where it was detected, and whether anything changed while you held the perimeter.
• Actions taken: what you isolated, when, with what barriers, and what was refused.
• The specific warning: the night manager proposed venting the drum with a bung wrench and may still attempt it, so the cage approach needs to be physically controlled. Also warn that this may be an incompatible mixture with a chlorine-type vapor rather than the product on the label - the team should not size their entry on the name 'sanitizer.'
• Give them your perimeter and the time it was set, and ask for their entry plan so you can adjust traffic and the ambulance staging.