Getting prepared: Army, local emergency management agencies
participate in chemical weapons exercise
Star Staff Writer
As morning traffic pushed down Quintard Avenue in Anniston around 8:45 a.m., a frightening practice scenario unfolded in which local, state and federal officials responded to a theoretical cloud of deadly nerve agent creeping through the Anniston area. The annual exercise, organized by the federal Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, imagined an accident at Anniston’s chemical weapons stockpile. In the four hours that followed, test messages went back and forth among the Anniston Army Depot, area emergency management agencies, first-responders, hospitals and schools. Some area schools practiced their shelter-in-place drills, hospitals readied for contaminated patients, and law enforcement officials kept an eye on the proceedings. In the depot’s emergency operations center, a hum of voices and swirl of bodies reacted to regular updates from the field, a mapping system that charted the imaginary plume and a steady stream of coded communications. In the middle of it all, the base commander, Alexander Raulerson, consulted with the Chemical Activity commander, Lt. Col. Darryl J. Briggs, strategizing the Army’s response. The room went silent for occasional updates, including one that announced phone lines were down, piped over the intercom.
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"I’d be happy to have that EOC working at Blue Grass," he said. Within five minutes of the first radio contact about the incident, the Army had contacted the Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency and was providing regular updates to area agencies. At the EMA in Jacksonville, workers huddled around computer screens while county officials and first responders waited quietly for updates and instructions. At one point shortly after 10 a.m., a man’s voice made an ominous announcement over the intercom: "Attention staff, the plume has entered zones A-5 and D-3." Behind the code words, acronyms and high-tech gadgets lay the potential impact on lives. If the event were real, people in zone A-5, the Alexandria area, and zone D-3, the Big Oak and Ohatchee area, would be dealing with life-and-death decisions at that moment. Would they know to shelter in place? Would they head for the highway? At one point, Dan Long, the EMA’s director, received a call from a concerned resident wondering if his house was contaminated. Long told the caller, one of about 40 actors pretending to be residents and news reporters, that his house was out of the affected zone. "There’s no reason to be alarmed," Long said calmly. "Everything’s fine." Sitting nearby, Calhoun County Commission Chairman Eli Henderson said things weren’t always so reassuring. Years ago, Henderson worked at the stockpile examining munitions. Caged rabbits were the only technology to detect agent leaks then, and no one gave much thought to a community-wide emergency response plan. "If something had happened, it would have been just ugly," Henderson said. While some area schools were included in this year’s drill, Calhoun County Schools sat it out, according to Mike Fincher, head of security for the district. Noting that the drill would require 10 of the district’s 19 schools to send students outside temporarily, Fincher said the decision had been made to keep children out of the cold rain. Normally, county schools practice the drill once a month. As the day wore down, officials readied for a fake press conference with faux media in a real information center at McClellan. Alain Southworth, spokeswoman for the Army’s chemical weapons stockpile in Deseret, Utah, had spent most of the day at the center evaluating the information dissemination. Overall, she said, updates had been accurate and well organized. Things don’t always go smoothly, though. Donald Jack, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official, related how he had posed as a reporter at a similar drill several years ago. Testing emergency responders awareness, Jack walked into a roped-off area and into a contaminated "hot zone." No one stopped him. "And suddenly, I was dead," he said. Mistakes are part of the process, said Rick Brletich, director of the CSEPP office at the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency in Aberdeen, Md. The goal, he said, is to learn from mistakes and make the process as effective as possible. "We take these exercises seriously. You practice how you play," he said. |
About Rob Jordan
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Rob Jordan covers Oxford for The Star. |
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