- Sarin in a San Francisco subway station. A dirty bomb
in Boston's T. These are some of the thrills emergency workers can experience
at a training center burrowed inside a West Virginia mountain.
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- The Center for National Response, which occupies a 2,800-foot-long
abandoned highway tunnel in rural West Virginia, is a proving ground for
soldiers, firefighters and police officers preparing to respond to terrorist
attacks on places like Boston's FleetCenter, where the Democratic National
Convention will be held this summer.
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- Like a gorier version of a Universal Studios theme park,
the CNR offers a variety of immersive experiences, from clandestine terrorist
labs to a fire- and smoke-filled subway station packed with the victims
of a chemical, biological or radiological attack.
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- The CNR's exercise planners control the fires, lighting
and wind speed inside the tunnel, and they plant materials that will trigger
the devices emergency workers use to detect weapons of mass destruction.
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- Business at the CNR, which is owned by the U.S. government
and managed by Titan, a San Diego, California-based contractor, has been
growing since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
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- Watch a promotional video from the Center for National
Reponse.
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- National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support
Teams, or WMD CSTs, which are called in by first responders to handle suspected
releases of biological, chemical and radiological materials, have been
the CNR's primary customers since it opened in 2000.
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- One of the teams practiced this February responding to
a terrorist attack on the Boston subway system, the T. Another responded
earlier this month to a simulated attack on Northern California's Bay Area
Rapid Transit system, or BART.
-
- An official from the San Francisco Fire Department who
participated in the BART training exercise said recent terrorist attacks
in Spain have highlighted the need for first responders to be ready to
deal with sudden devastation in highly populated areas.
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- "We want to be prepared for something like that
which happened in Madrid," said SFFD Special Operations Chief Robert
Navarro, referring to the simultaneous bombing of three Madrid train stations
in March.
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- Fire and police personnel are typically the first responders
to terrorist attacks, and their chiefs are expected to take command of
disaster scenes, as they did in New York on 9/11. But until recently, few
of them had the training needed to deal with the carnage caused by large
explosives and WMDs.
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- "Back in the '90s, the focus was on accidents,"
said John E. Pike, director of Alexandria, Virginia-based GlobalSecurity.org,
which analyzes new and emerging national security threats. "Fire,
police and ambulance workers had plenty of experience responding to accidents
and chemical spills. But now the events they are worried about (including
dirty bombs) are becoming bigger and more challenging."
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- The CNR is the type of facility that civilian first responders
can use to learn how to handle WMDs, Pike said.
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- It's also a place where military WMD specialists can
wield high-tech weapon-detection devices and muck around in bulky hazmat
suits without alarming civilians.
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- "You can train without disrupting the normal business
of everyday life," said Lt. Col. James D. Campbell, commander of the
11th WMD CST.
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- Emergency workers training at the CNR also learn a truism
well-known to military veterans, said Joseph F. Earley, operations officer
at the CNR: They must learn to adapt to the unexpected inside the tunnel.
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- Just as in the battlefield, said Earley, inside the CNR,
"No plan survives first contact."
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- http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/040527-disaster-practice.htm
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