FW: USA Today article on radiological emergency training

["Jacobus, John (OD/ORS)" <jacobusj@ors.od.nih.gov>]

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-- John 



John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist 

3050 Traymore Lane

Bowie, MD  20715-2024



E-mail:  jenday1@email.msn.com (H)      



-----Original Message-----

Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 1:03 PM



>From today's edition.  The link is at the bottom.

==========================

Preparing for what may come



By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY



MERCURY, Nev. - Silhouetted against a rocky red landscape that brings to

mind Mars, four men - ghostly figures in white, barking through sinister

black gas masks - prepare to open a rusty door. On the other side is a house

of horrors, terrorist style.



"Stand by!" orders police Cmdr. James Coker of Hoover, Ala. His shoulder

hits metal; inside the cavernous room, the quartet fans out into a soup of

darkness and smoke.



For a moment, silence. Then a metallic buzzing sound: A radiation detector

has picked up its prey. "It's hot!" says Coker, directing his teammates

away.



Suddenly, he yells: "Victim!"



Hanging from a steel rafter, hands and feet bound, is a bloody mannequin.



"Good job," says instructor Ron Montgomery, who stands nearby in civilian

clothes with a radio in hand. "Now read the victim's status off the card

near his head, and I'll call it in to the incident commander."



And so goes another final exam here at the U.S. Department of Energy's

Nevada Test Site, a secretive desert outpost the size of Rhode Island where,

from 1951 to 1992, nearly 1,000 nuclear explosions lit up the sky and

rattled the ground.



In this staged scenario, terrorists have detonated a radiation-filled "dirty

bomb," and responders have to find a safe route through the hot zone to

reach survivors. The drill underscores the site's new role as a Top Gun-type

school where police, fire and medical experts - dubbed "first responders" -

train for biological, chemical and, yes, nuclear disasters that have gone

from the unthinkable to the possible.



Although students have trickled into the federally funded course for three

years, since Sept. 11 demand has mushroomed into a six-month waiting list.



On Wednesday, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and Federal Emergency

Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh visit the site to watch instructors

run through a scenario like the one experienced by Coker and his nearly

three dozen peers from around the nation. Ridge's office has sought to keep

both civilians (via controversial security alerts) and first responders

tuned in to what it considers a persistent terrorist threat.



More than five months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon, many Americans have managed to resume their pre-Sept. 11 lives.

But the nation's emergency personnel cannot afford such a luxury.



In fact, conversations with students here, many from small towns with modest

budgets, reveal that some feel overwhelmed, underequipped and just plain

vulnerable.



"As the big cities build up their levels of protection, that leaves the

heartland of America as a target," says David Sloan, a captain with the

Ashland, Ky., fire department. "It makes you mad. But then you just try and

do what you can to protect your town."



Which is why funding for the course should be tripled from its current $25

million ($10 million from the Department of Energy and the rest from the

Department of Justice), says Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who wants the test

site to be home to what he would call the National Center for Anti-Terrorist

Training.



"The site is isolated, guarded and capable of all sorts of mock scenarios,

from chemical spills to radiation leaks. We need to run more people through

this type of training, and we should have done it yesterday," Reid says.



At the current level of funding, approximately 1,500 first responders can be

trained annually, from a pool of 100,000-plus professionals nationwide.



"I have a friend who is a police officer in Ely, Nev.," Reid says. "He says,

'Why bother alerting me when a chemical or radiological shipment is passing

through? If anything happened, I wouldn't know how to handle it, anyway.'

Well, that has to change."



Weapons of mass destruction



For each participant, the four-day seminar - technically known as the

Weapons of Mass Destruction Responder Operations course - begins with a

drive north from the Las Vegas airport, 90 miles of rock, dirt and the

occasional Joshua tree.



Once past the military checkpoint in the dilapidated town of Mercury, the

students find their bunks and meet each other.



Firefighters from Kentucky. Emergency services staffers from Virginia.

Police officers from Detroit. The cross-departmental mix is deliberate,

another way to get folks thinking about how cooperation is key in a

catastrophe.



The responders, almost all of them men, share business cards and a

much-needed outlet for newfound tension.



"I've never been so busy in my life. Hospital staffers are now screaming for

chem and bio training. We're just getting bombarded daily," says Melinda

Duncan, who helps coordinate members of the Northern Virginia EMS Council in

Manassas. Initially, she was scheduled to take this course a few days after

Sept. 11.



"I couldn't take it mentally," she says. "But I'm ready now. We need

training so we don't get freaked out. Radiation is something that scares

most people."



And so begin three days of classroom work led by dozens of experts working

for DOE subcontractor Bechtel Nevada. Seminars, including "Fundamental

Principles of Radiation" ("You can work with it more than you think, as long

as you're informed and prepared," says former Green Beret Barry Smith), and

a Chernobyl meltdown case study ("The lesson there is that correct

information was not spread fast enough, and people paid the price," says

ex-Soviet army doctor Igor Shafhid).



Shortly after dawn on Day 4, the students shuffle into class one last time

to get their briefing for the Phoenix Culmination Exercise - the

terrorism-based test to see who has learned what in this crash course on

nuclear nightmares.



Sipping Diet Cokes and fiddling with their Geiger counters, the trainees

listen as instructor Montgomery belts out the situation.



"When you get out to the scene, you need to know that SWAT has neutralized

the terrorists, but not before they set off a dirty bomb. Find a route into

that facility that can then be safely navigated by medical personnel. Any

questions?" Silence. "Let's go."



Cool under pressure



For three hours, eight teams of four first responders make their way

painstakingly into an ominous steel structure that once was part of an

American effort to send nuclear-powered rockets into space.



Once inside, every squawk of their radiation detectors makes them freeze,

then try a new route.



Smoke causes some students to walk right past injured victims ("You're going

to have a lawsuit on your hands," Montgomery scolds) and breeze by

"dangerous" pockets of radiation (paperweight-size chunks of cesium 137 that

set off the counter but pose no health threat). Most, however, perform

flawlessly.



Back outside, under the merciless Nevada sun, the responders strip off their

white Tyvek suits and gas masks, grab sandwiches and jaw about their

experience - and how it might apply to what awaits them back home.



"I feel better than I did four days ago, for the simple reason that while I

don't think terrorists would strike us in the middle of Kansas, if they hit

Kansas City, I'll have to know how to help out," says Raymond Raney of

Republic County Emergency Management Services in Belleville.



"Come to think of it," he adds quietly, "while it's rural where I am,

there's a nuclear power plant a few hundred miles away."



Sweat caking his hair to his scalp, Lincoln Miller offers that he doesn't

have to look far to find a terrorist target - the Marathon Ashland oil

refinery in Catlettsburg, Ky., where he is fire chief.



"Out here, we've learned that to successfully deal with these situations,

you need extreme patience," he says, pointing to the seven other

firefighters and paramedics from his Kentucky county. "So if my boss is

hollering at me for information, I can reassure him that what's most

important is doing things right, not fast."



Matthew Adkins, deputy director of the Boyd County (Ky.) Office of Emergency

Management, organized the trip to the Nevada Test Site. He says Sept. 11 has

made it easier for him to recruit people for additional training.



"The message has been brought home," he says.



Nearby, helping each other with their gear before piling into a van for the

ride back to the airport, police officer Coker and firefighter Tom Hayden

shoot a final glance at their classroom, massive storage tanks that once

cooled nuclear fuel that are all but swallowed up by the immense desert.



"I tell you, a situation with radiation is not normally a fire or police

issue," says Hayden, a battalion chief in Prince George's County, Md. "Then

again, we're always the first guys there."



Coker nods, then runs a hand through his military haircut and whispers: "I

just hope this sort of training is never needed."

  

 

 http://www.usatoday.com/life/2002/2002-02-20-terror-training.htm

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