Article Display

'Dirty bomb' exercise

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Kevin Williams
  • 20th Fighter Wing Public Affairs
SHAW AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. --  The 20th Aerospace Medicine Squadron Bioenvironmental Engineering Readiness Element along with the 20th Civil Engineer Squadron Emergency Management and Readiness and Fire Department participated in a training exercise here April 8, 2009 to response to a possible radiological dispersal device, or "dirty bomb."

1st Lt. Michael Salyer, readiness element chief, said the purpose of the exercise was to solidify their capability to respond to hazardous material, terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction, or chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents in and around Shaw.

Tech. Sgt. Jessica Feil, 20th CE Emergency Management Plans and Operations NCO in charge, explained this particilar training scenario.

"A truck containing radioactive material and explosives gained access to the base and ran into a tanker truck containing (jet fuel)," she said. "The fire department responded to the ensuing fire and fuel leak. After a time their personal dosimeters started to alarm, alerting them of a radiological hazard. That is when they contacted biornvironmental and CE readiness."

As a team, the lieutenant noted, the three agencies ensure they can communicate the health and operational risks facing the base and local population to the 20th Fighter Wing Commander. They need to be able to give him the correct information so he can make informed decisions on how to respond to the incident, whether it is to shelter-in-place, evacuation or retaliation.

Teamwork and communication between the three organizations was the key for success of the exercise. Lt. Salyer said.

"I feel the teams worked well together," the lieutenant said. "Bioenvironmental and CE readiness combined our efforts to give a health and operational risk to the incident commander. The fire department set up and maintained the initial cordon, patched a leaking fuel tanker and maintained an emergency decontamination station in case a responder (required decontamination)."

Lt. Salyer said with any training, there are always lessons learned and areas where improvement can be made. When they encountered issues, the team was able to quickly adapt and get things going in the right direction.

"We had a few problems initially with roles and responsibilities because we haven't been able to exercise together for a while," Lt. Salyer explained. "But we turned everything around and made it into a walkthrough training exercise. We discussed all of the appropriate actions that we would do in this response situation."

Sgt. Feil explained how the overall feeling is this training is valuable when it comes to responding to real-world incidents.

"We used the exercise as a training opportunity and not to evaluate our response," she said. "It was an opportunity to evaluate our procedures and make any necessary changes to the way we operate."

"This ended up being a good training experience," Lt. Salyer said. "We've responded to real world incidents downtown and worked together to identify, quantify and communicate health risks associated with unknown materials. (This exercise) is purely a combined effort to maintain proficiency that all three shops have agreed upon. We try to exercise together each quarter to keep our response capabilities at their best, just in case something happens."