Butane Honey Oil Lab Safety Guide for Emergency First Responders

About the Program

Category: Risk and Emergency Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

A safety study on butane honey or hash oil (BHO) laboratories has resulted in a complete revision of standard operating procedures for first responder safety. The information was compiled and published as a guide in the Journal of the Clandestine Laboratory Investigating Chemists Association in January 2016, and has been disseminated to the Fire Departments throughout the region during Zone Training sessions reaching over a 1,000 firefighters in 2016 so far. The illicit labs extract tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) from marijuana using volatile solvents such as butane. BHO labs pose a real danger to the responders and the public as the flammable solvents could ignite and explode. The County of San Diego Department of Environmental Health (DEH) Hazardous Incident Response Team (HIRT) developed a collaborative project studying the extreme hazards of BHO and sought to evaluate the conditions leading to an explosion and systematically characterized those parameters by conducting controlled simulations. The guide has also been shared internationally with first responders.