Article

September 2003

Virginia’s Civil Support Team Tests Its Readiness

by Harold Kennedy

On a rain-swept military base in Virginia Beach this summer, members of the Virginia National Guard’s 34th Civil Support Team (Weapons of Mass Destruction)—in bulky, airtight protective “moon suits”—struggled to retrieve a stretcher-borne casualty.

The casualty, one of their own, had been injured while investigating what seemed to be a pipe bomb and a suspicious looking powder. The team was required to recover the injured person, test him for contamination, decontaminate him and treat his injuries. It was part of a one-day exercise designed to test the team’s readiness to handle chemical, biological and nuclear incidents.

Currently, there are 32 such teams around the country. They are designed to help state and local emergency units respond to WMD-related events. (related story p. 36) Virginia’s team stood up in 2000 and was certified as fully mission capable in January 2002, according to its commander, Lt. Col. Colleen Chipper.

“Every 18 months, they run an exercise for every CST to evaluate our skills,” she told National Defense. As it turned out, this exercise had to be conducted in a driving rainstorm. “It’s just as well,” she said. “We have to be able to operate in any kind of weather.”

The CST—headquartered at Fort Pickett, southwest of Richmond—consists of 22 fulltime members of Virginia’s Army and Air Guard, Chipper said. They bring to the team a wide range of specialties, including nuclear, biological and chemical technologies; medicine; communications; systems analysis; logistics, and administration, she said.

“Each team member gets about 700 hours of WMD-related training,” Chipper said. Classes are provided by several Defense Department schools, the Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Fire Academy. The team conducts monthly exercises in coordination with local first responders.

The team has two major pieces of mobile equipment—an analytical laboratory and a communications van. The lab enables the team to identify chemical and biological agents in the field. The process is much faster than sending samples to a central state lab, Chipper said.

The team recently received two new additions for the lab. An FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) can identify chemical molecules and rule out biological molecules in about a minute. The FTIR is ruggedized and about the size of a shoebox.

A PCR (polymerase chain reaction) identifies biological warfare agents, such as anthrax, ricin, small pox and botulinum, and biological pathogens, including e-coli and salmonella, in about an hour. It is about the size of a carry-on suitcase.

The communications van is equipped with secure satellite and cellular telephones to enable team members to talk with civil and military authorities even when ordinary systems are down.

The team’s personal protective equipment includes self-contained breathing apparatus, moon suits, chemical-protection clothing, gas masks and tactical decontamination gear.

To perform reconnaissance, detection and sampling, the team uses a wide array of high-tech gadgets, including digital still and video cameras, Photo-Ionization Detectors, an Improved Chemical Agent Monitor and an M-22 Chemical Agent Detector.

The team’s members are “on call 24/7,” Chipper said. All live within 45 minutes of Fort Pickett. “The advance team—seven to nine people—is out the door within 90 minutes of receiving a call,” she said. “The rest of the team will be on the road within three hours of the call.”

The team is trained to drive to events within 250 miles of its headquarters, Chipper said. Events beyond that radius may warrant use of helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft.

Because of the state’s geography, some officials are calling for a second team. They note that Virginia contains two particularly attractive targets for terrorists—the nation’s capital in the north and Norfolk, the world’s largest complex of military bases, far to the South. One team, it is said, would have a hard time responding to incidents in both places at the same time.

Teams are supposed to respond to incidents in neighboring states if asked, Chipper said. The Virginia team has been training with units from surrounding states, she noted. Not all of the surrounding states, however, have fulltime teams.

Fulltime teams were certified in West Virginia and Tennessee earlier this year. Washington, D.C., and Maryland still do not have such teams, but the Marine Corps’ Chemical Biological Incident Response Force, with 350 Marines and sailors, is stationed in Indian Head, Md., just outside of the capital.

This particular exercise was set at Camp Pendleton, Va. This Camp Pendleton is a state military reservation in the resort city of Virginia Beach, not the sprawling Marine facility in California. A WMD strike in Virginia Beach could be a major disaster, Chipper said. It is close, for example, to the Norfolk Navy base, Oceana Naval Air Station and Atlantic beaches that attract millions of tourists per year.

“If there was a release into the air, we could have to order a mass evacuation,” Chipper said. Conducting an evacuation through Norfolk’s system of bridges and tunnels would be difficult and time-consuming, she said.

With this in mind, the CST brought with it a small unit of forecasters from the 200th Weather Flight of the Virginia Air National Guard to keep track of the airflow.

“If there was a release, it would be good to know which way the wind is blowing, which direction that release might go,” Chipper said.

According to the exercise’s scenario, Boy Scouts on a camping trip discovered what appeared to be a makeshift laboratory set up by possible terrorists. Along with the lab, they found an apparent pipe bomb and a mysterious looking powder. The scouts alerted the local authorities, who requested the CST.

“When we come on the scene, one of the first things we ask is, ‘Has EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) been called?’ That’s not one of our capabilities,” Chipper said.

Another capability that the team does not have is combat. Team members are unarmed, Chipper said. “We leave that to the local authorities, the state police, military police, regular units of the National Guard,” she explained. “In this case, the FBI is here. If it involves terrorist activity, they’ll be around. ...

“There’s usually some police on the scene, and that’s who we rely upon for security,” Chipper said.” We’re too focused on finding out what’s there.”

To investigate the suspected laboratory, the team set up a temporary headquarters, built around a collection of vans, trucks and large, rain-soaked military tents. Then, the team’s reconnaissance unit donned moon suits and SCBA gear, and approached the site.

According to the scenario, however, one member of the recon unit fell in the vicinity of the laboratory—injuring his head, neck and back—and possibly contaminated himself. “It’s what we call a ‘man-down incident,’” Chipper said. “We train a lot for it.”

Other members of the recon unit loaded their colleague on to a stretcher and carried him back to the temporary headquarters, where a decontamination site had been established.

There—with the recon unit still wearing moon suits—the injured man was washed down to remove contamination. An ICAM was used to make sure it was safe to cut off the casualty’s moon suit and to turn him over to the team’s medical unit.

When the suit was removed, however, it was discovered—according to the scenario—that the injured man was suffering cardiac arrest, and a defibrillator was employed to restore his heartbeat. He then was transferred to a nearby hospital for emergency medical care.

Chipper pronounced herself pleased with the team’s performance. She also praised the support it has received from Guard commanders. “We’re well-funded and resourced,” she said.

Other team members, however, argued that they were shorthanded. “I could use some more people,” said Sgt. 1st Class Ken Tomkinson, head of the team’s recon unit. His unit, whose job it is to enter and investigate possible contaminated sites, has eight members now. “I could use at least six more,” he said.

The exercise, in any case, was rated a success. Judges watching the team’s operations found that it had completed 15 mission tasks at “a sustained level of performance,” despite heavy rains, and declared it “trained in all areas.”

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