US Anti-Terror Training Camps Booked Solid
Centers train police, firefighters, and rescue workers how to deal with disasters.
December 2, 2002
By Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY
At a 100-bed hospital in Alabama, doctors and nurses try to quarantine a smallpox outbreak as frantic relatives pound on the emergency-room doors. In a suburb of Detroit, police commandos creep past homes, a motel and a bank to confront hostage-takers in a minimarket.
Terror training drills at Denver's Mile High Stadium in February 2002.
AP file
Inside a West Virginia mountain, rescuers probe for survivors in the rubble of a bombed building, then respond to a subway station contaminated with an unknown chemical agent.
Those potential scenarios of domestic terrorism unfolded last month at training centers for police, firefighters, emergency medical specialists and other rescue workers who would be the first to respond to terrorist attacks in the USA. Public-safety experts say that such exercises, using sophisticated mock-ups of real life, can help equip "first responders" in ways that classroom instruction and scripted run-throughs can't.
The rank-and-file seem to agree: Tens of thousands have gone through hands-on training since the 2001 terrorist attacks. The National Domestic Preparedness Consortium, a partnership of federal agencies and public universities, hopes to train 100,000 police, fire, rescue and emergency health workers a year.
With an estimated 7.5 million first responders and 4 million health care workers in America, demand far exceeds openings in courses, which can include drills to combat biochemical terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, hostage-takers, explosives and other threats.
But Van Romero, chairman of the consortium, says that key personnel in the USA's 120 most vulnerable cities already have been schooled under a 1996 anti-terrorism preparedness law passed after a Japanese cult's 1995 poison gas attack in a Tokyo subway. Those areas include large cities, state capitals and ports.
"Yes, training is urgent," Romero says. "A year ago, I would have said we were definitely at the crisis level. But we've really ramped up a lot. Now it's manageable."
The Sept. 11 attacks "really put it into hyperdrive," says Michael Bouchard, sheriff of Oakland County, Mich. His deputies received SWAT training last month at the new Combined Regional Emergency Services Training Center, or CREST, north of Detroit. The $8 million, 22-acre "town" at Oakland Community College includes furnished houses and businesses with stocked shelves, curbs and sidewalks, even a working traffic light. Other specialized programs:
*In Socorro, N.M., a one-week course on emergency response to terrorist bombs has a six-month waiting list. "We build two buildings a week and blow them up," says Romero, a vice president for research and development at New Mexico Tech, home of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center. The center's course on suicide bombings begins pilot classes in January.
*Near Charleston, W.Va., the Center for National Response is booked 18 months ahead with police, firefighters, emergency workers and National Guard teams assigned to help in civilian emergencies. Its training ground is an abandoned highway tunnel that stretches for three-quarters of a mile. Drills cover bioterror attacks, hazardous materials, bombed-out buildings and highway and rail disasters. It's the first part of West Virginia's planned National Training Center for Homeland Security, a federally funded project of West Virginia University and the state's National Guard. Planners envision military and civilian exercises on simulated city streets, an industrial factory and a mock airport, all to be built at Fort Dawson National Guard post near Kingwood, W.Va.
*In Fort Worth, Tarrant County College just opened a 23-acre, $17 million fire training center with a fake cityscape full of emergency hazards: A six-story tower, hotel, strip shopping center, a river-like channel for practicing rescues in fast-flowing water, outdoor fuel spills and rail accidents. Like CREST, it was under construction before 9/11 as a regional training center for conventional emergencies as part of the school's firefighter academy. Since then, "we discovered so many possibilities for training in mass-casualty situations," says Ted Phillips, head of the college's Public Safety Institute. "We've already been contacted by a nuclear power plant and other agencies about specialized training that they're geared up for since 9/11."
*In Anniston, Ala., the hospital at Fort McClellan, which was shuttered when the Army post closed in 1999, is now an ER-style classroom for doctors, nurses and emergency health workers. A project of the U.S. Public Health Service and Vanderbilt, Alabama-Birmingham and Louisiana State universities, Noble Training Center is the only hospital-sized facility for teaching medical response to weapons of mass destruction. The Center for Domestic Preparedness, which trains police, fire and rescuers with real biochemical agents, occupies the Army's former chemical "school" on the defunct base.
"It felt very real," says Keith Borg, an emergency-room physician and resident at the University of Cincinnati Hospital who drilled at Noble in biochemical scenarios last month. "You start off your day seeing ankle sprains and colds and minor trauma, like a day at work. Then they spring a disaster on you — a chemical plant explosion or a bioterrorism event."
The "event" was smallpox. One suspicious rash became five, then dozens. Doctors and nurses had to don protective suits. They ran out of medical supplies and had to reorder lest patients "die."
"Even though they are mannequins, there's pressure," says Page Verlander, a Virginia hospital nursing director who also participated. "We had to determine where we would store our dead patients to make room for the live patients. We had irate family members, banging on the outside doors, trying to come in when we were in isolation."
Hands-on facilities such as these aren't entirely new. Since 1987, the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., has trained agents in surveillance, street survival and other tactics in "Hogan's Alley," a mock town with a motel, theater and houses. The Army and Marine Corps practice urban warfare in faux downtowns at bases in North Carolina, Louisiana, Washington state and elsewhere. Since 1975, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia has been boot camp for more than 70 federal agencies. (Its anti-terrorism courses are booked through next year.)
But few facilities are available to state and local police, fire and public-safety departments to train together in realistic settings. Occasionally, such teams use vacant buildings, defunct factories or obsolete sports arenas to practice search-and-rescue techniques, put out fires or drill for armed standoffs. But it's hard to stage major exercises regularly without disrupting traffic or alarming neighbors.
A network of specialized training facilities "was a good idea before 9/11. After 9/11, it's almost visionary," says William Furtaw, director of CREST, which encourages simultaneous training by police, fire and other departments from the same locales. "9/11 identified the need for cooperative training before an event. When you have a large-scale disaster, jurisdictions that train together respond more effectively."
Attendance at most of the federal training sites is paid for by Justice Department grants. College-based facilities like the ones in Michigan and Texas expect to charge course fees but are exploring federal grants, too.
Training millions of police, firefighters and other first responders would take many years, so many courses "train the trainer," with participants going home to teach others.
"We get a commitment ... that they will educate at least 50 people in their home jurisdiction," says New Mexico's Romero. He adds that an estimated 20% annual job turnover rate among first responders means a permanent need for such training.
After her week at Noble in Alabama, Verlander exuded such enthusiasm that several of her colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University's hospital in Richmond want to go now, too.
"When you drill in a real hospital, at any one time a physician can say, 'The drill's going to stop. I've got to see (real) patients,' " she says. "But there, we were no longer in control. It was so much like a real disaster."
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