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Thursday, December 27, 2007

Torrance County Exercise Tests Readiness for a Terror Attack

By Laura Nesbitt
Mountain View Telegraph
    To prepare emergency responders for an actual terrorism event in Torrance County, an emergency scenario was staged in McIntosh.
    The 64th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team, a branch of the New Mexico National Guard stationed in Rio Rancho, participated in the simulated emergency event Dec. 20 behind the McIntosh Volunteer Fire Department. Three observer-participants from the county— county Emergency Manager John Cordova, Fire Marshal Jason Trumbull and Lt. Lance Brown of the McIntosh Fire Department— also took part.
    The all-day event was coordinated through the corporate headquarters of PM Tec Inc. in Los Alamos.
    The event was staged so WMD-CST commanders can evaluate the "adequacy of their response training" in case an actual, real-life situation should occur, according to the script written by PM Tec.
    No harmful chemicals or substances of any kind were used in the chemical terrorism incident scenario, said Maj. Daniel Jaramillo, commander of the 64th WMD-CST.
    At 4 a.m. Dec. 20 Jaramillo received a phone call from James Leach of PM Tec. The event was planned, and the call was scheduled.
    Had the event been a real-life emergency, Jaramillo said, the call would have come from the state Office of Emergency Management.
    Jaramillo then contacted 21 of the 22 full-time members of the 64th WMD-CST team and told them to report to Cordova, who had been designated as the incident commander for the exercise. Normally all of the team members would have been called but one member was unavailable for this pre-planned exercise, Leach said.
    After picking up all of their equipment in Rio Rancho, the team drove to the staging site behind the McIntosh Volunteer Fire Department and arrived about 6:30 a.m.
    WMD-CST vehicles included: a communications suite trailer combining military and local channels with police and fire departments and a two-way satellite hookup; an operations trailer, a "hub" where all members of the team compare notes on a white board and determine operation direction; a medical vehicle with a physician's assistant; a survey trailer for compilation of samples and photographs of the area; a decontamination trailer with equipment necessary to clean suits; an analytical lab system trailer with an analysis laboratory; and a command vehicle with another satellite back-up dish for tracking, Leach said.
    The unmarked trucks are "designed to be inconspicuous" and are able to be flown or driven to the area required, Leach said during the drill.
    When the team arrived Cordova briefed Jaramillo about a laboratory containing unknown substances in an abandoned railroad car. A man was discovered outside the car and two other people were found inside, apparently "overcome by some type of toxic fumes," according to the script.
    Team members wear Level A HAZMAT suits that protect against almost all biological agents, chemicals and industrial materials and most radiation except gamma rays. The suits cost about $1,800 each, Jaramillo said.
    The script required that the team find simulated anthrax and simulated organophosphates inside the boxcar, Jaramillo said. The nondangerous chemicals used in the exercise also successfully trigger meters in a machine in the team's analytical laboratory truck.
    "We pick a (nondangerous) chemical that we know will trigger that machine," Leach said. Household chemicals are generally used to simulate the substances, he said.
    "There are things that you can use to simulate these two substances that are nontoxic," Jaramillo said.
    Had it been an actual emergency situation, the team would have sent the substances to a state laboratory, the Centers for Disease Control and the FBI laboratory for additional verification, Leach said.
    Capt. James Willis of the team performed DNA identifications on the substances in the analytical trailer, Leach said. Willis is able to perform DNA identifications on chemicals more quickly than on living tissue.
    "It's hours instead of days," Leach said.
    The 64th WMD-CST team performs up to 36 of these enactments each year all over the state, Jaramillo said.
    The team has responded to at least six real events in the last three years, including the space shuttle crash, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and a radiation incident at the State Fairgrounds in Albuquerque in which no one was harmed, according to Jaramillo.
    Leach said Torrance, Sandoval, Valencia and Socorro counties will join Bernalillo County for a "full-scale exercise" in December 2009. The simulated event is meant to coordinate communications, medical, fire and law enforcement responses and mutual aid between counties, Leach said.
    He estimated that several hundred people would be involved in that operation.
    "A lot of money was spent on buying homeland security equipment over the last six or so years. Now we're bringing together these areas to work together on these exercises, so if something happens they'll know what to do," Leach said.
    The staged operation in McIntosh was a preliminary exercise for the larger one planned in 2009, Leach said.