COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Removing a one-ton jagged piece of broken concrete is not an easy task — especially when there are no cranes.
One of the first skills firefighters and other first responders learn at
Disaster City is how to hoist a slab of concrete off a rubble pile using
only their muscles.
They pull the concrete up “exactly the way we think the Egyptians did it,” said Brian Smith, public information officer for Texas Task Force One.
They use lumber to create an A-frame around the slab, suspend the load underneath, and then use leverage to lift it off.
This is training, but in the real world, there might be a disaster victim underneath.
“Initially, you are not going to have cranes. You’re going to be at an incident 24 hours before cranes show up, so you have to do a lot of these things by hand,” Smith said.
The seeds of this training center were planted after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 when Texas needed a location to prepare its Task Force One team, which was set up to respond to similar disasters.
Since then it has evolved into a facility that welcomes firefighters, weapons of mass destruction response teams and other first responders from throughout the United States and overseas.
It has taught more than 5,000 WMD/ terrorism incident courses to some 200,000 emergency responders from 8,200 local and state jurisdictions.
Since 9/11, it has received an infusion of Department of Homeland Security grant money to help it expand its courses and facilities.
It sits next to one of the largest firefighter training facilities in the world, the Texas Engineering Extension Service’s Brayton Fire Training Field, but is a separate entity. Urban search and rescue has always been considered a secondary skill set for firefighters, but with the threat of terrorist attacks, recent devastating hurricanes, and the ever-present possibility of major earthquakes, more fire departments are sending personnel to training facilities such as
Disaster City to learn how to extract victims from collapsed buildings or
rubble piles.
Basic skills learned during the first few days of the course are: breaching and breaking — to bust through buildings; shoring, which prevents the structure from collapse; and lifting and moving pieces of debris.
For the lifting and moving course, trainers devised what they call “the mousetrap,” a giant puzzle of concrete slabs. When one side is lifted, the other end tilts down.
“It’s like a seesaw,” Smith explained. It teaches the students the old science class maxim, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It might seem safe to lift one end of a large piece of debris, but what happens to the other end of the slab? Is there a victim underneath, or will it jostle other chunks and cause a wall to collapse?
After these basic skills are learned, students move on to Disaster City, a 52-acre facility of collapsed buildings, derailed train cars and rubble piles. The damaged structures include everything from single-family homes to a strip mall and movie theater. The “Pancake House” doesn’t simulate a restaurant, but a multi-story building that has fallen into a stack of concrete slabs.
“There is a lot more to it than it appears,” explained Bob McKee, director of urban search and rescue at the center, as he pointed at a pile of busted up wood with nails sticking out.
Inside these rubble piles are built-in voids where role players can hide. Canine teams training in Disaster City have to learn to deal with these nails, dew that makes the boards wet, and other real-word conditions, he said.
While much of this basic training focuses on breaching and removing concrete, urban search and rescue can’t ignore wood, especially when hurricanes and tornadoes are involved, he said.
Emergency response teams put all the skills together for a longer exercise in Disaster City.
“They can run for hours or days. That’s where we can really simulate the reality,” McKee said.
Smith said role-playing is involved as well. Sometimes he plays the “wishy-washy” commander, who doesn’t quite know what to do, or the “overbearing commander,” who is protective of his turf. They have to work their way around him. It’s up to the agencies requesting the training to decide what kind of experience they want.
“They want to engage with various types of fire and police chiefs,” Smith said.
The Brayton facility has existed since 1960, and firefighting training at nearby Texas A&M University dates back to the 1920s, so adding urban search and rescue was seen as a natural outgrowth, Smith said.
Disaster City also serves as a test bed for equipment manufacturers who want to collect data on new extraction devices. Along with urban search and rescue, the center offers water rescue training, Department of Defense certified explosive ordnance disposal courses and hazardous material response. Trainers also go on the road to conduct courses.
Melding hazmat response into search-and-rescue training is something more fire departments are seeking, said Capt. Paul Gunnels, hazmat coordinator at the center and an officer at the College Station Fire Department.
“It used to be that hazmat, and technical rescue were separate disciplines,” he said. Now there is a growing recognition that a scenario might have both a weapon of mass destruction and collapsed structures involved.
The center has hosted several of the National Guard’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams. These are 22-member units that will be called to provide advice to first responders in the event of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.
Normally, these teams would not take part in urban search and rescue, but they recognize that there is such a thing as “mission creep,” Smith said. They may be called in to rescue one of their own, or they may need to know when a structure is properly shored up and therefore safe to enter, he said.
Just beyond Disaster City is the Emergency Operations Training Center, a 32,000-square foot facility where emergency response commanders learn how to manage wide-scale disasters.
The enhanced incident management unified command course takes senior officers through simulated disasters that require them to manage hundreds of personnel, fire trucks and other assets on the ground.
“We turn on the simulation and run people through the process of how a command post is supposed to do business,” said David Nock, EOTC training director.
The center has its own software that runs various scenarios.
A wide-scale disaster may involve 600 emergency responders and 200 fire trucks, police cars and other vehicles.
“It takes a significant management process coordination … to be able to get all of that sequenced, organized and focused into the direction it’s supposed to be going in,” Nock said.
“To just walk in without an understanding how to do that, you would have chaos,” he said.
The fact is, such wide-scale disasters are rare. Fire departments and police know how to handle routine incidents — house fires, car wrecks, etc. — but a weapon of mass destruction being detonated in a major city is, thankfully, almost unheard of in the United States.
Earthquakes, hurricanes, wild fires are not. Nevertheless, few personnel have had any experience in managing such incidents, Nock said.
“You can get through a 20- to 25-year career in emergency management and not have a really significant event,” Nock added.
The newly expanded facility, built partially with DHS grants, sits in a spot between Disaster City and the Brayton Fire Training Field, which allows the center to conduct full-scale training with commanders in the operations center directing emergency responders on the ground. There are 11 cameras outside that give the command and control center real-time situational awareness.
“Every single one of the exercises, you can get your arms around it, you can manage it, you can mitigate it and get it taken care of,” he said.
All these scenarios should be manageable, Nock said.
“We will not do anything along the lines of Godzilla coming out of the bay,” Nock said.
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