Manufacturing Danger: The BioLab Story
Oct 6, 2026 · 27 min · 11 segments
A peer-reviewed Georgia Tech study identified 26 chemical species in the air after the BioLab fire, with bromine, not chlorine, dominating the earliest plume measurements. In this episode of…
Pamela KirklandHost
She lived 13 miles from Biolab and said she got sick after the fire, eventually ending up in the emergency room.
And she says the doctor there told her he knew exactly what she'd been exposed to.
He said the bromine in that cloud The orangish red color is attaching to your mucus membranes and it's building up, causing it to feel like you're suffocating, but you're not really suffocating.
Hannah was later diagnosed with reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, or RADS.
She says her doctors believe the chemical exposure from the fire triggered it.
In season two, bromine came up again, this time from someone who had worked inside Biolab.
Former Biolab engineer Randy Garcia told me the plant manufactured chlorinated pool products, which we knew very early on.
We also made bromine, like the toilet tablets, you know, that could get scary too.
And, you know, and I'll see employees inhaling and being exposed to it.
And it was just terrifying to me.
You know, like it's literally made to clean toilets.
So it's like, do you really want that on your body? Do you really want to breathe that in? I don't know all the health effects that it causes, but I wasn't trying to find out.
She lived 13 miles from Biolab and said she got sick after the fire, eventually ending up in the emergency room.
And she says the doctor there told her he knew exactly what she'd been exposed to.
He said the bromine in that cloud The orangish red color is attaching to your mucus membranes and it's building up, causing it to feel like you're suffocating, but you're not really suffocating.
Hannah was later diagnosed with reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, or RADS.
She says her doctors believe the chemical exposure from the fire triggered it.
In season two, bromine came up again, this time from someone who had worked inside Biolab.
Former Biolab engineer Randy Garcia told me the plant manufactured chlorinated pool products, which we knew very early on.
We also made bromine, like the toilet tablets, you know, that could get scary too.
And, you know, and I'll see employees inhaling and being exposed to it.
And it was just terrifying to me.
You know, like it's literally made to clean toilets.
So it's like, do you really want that on your body? Do you really want to breathe that in? I don't know all the health effects that it causes, but I wasn't trying to find out.
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