ANDREWS AFB, Md. –
Images of bombed-out buildings such as the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, and the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, serve to remind Air Force first responders what they may face on any given day.
A course taught to Air Force members at Andrews and Bolling adds to the stress of disaster response operations by creating scenarios that include challenges like chemical, biological and radiological attacks inside a simulated partially collapsed building.
This was a scenario that 60 Airman from the Air Force District of Washington faced during a week-long series of training exercises at a simulation facility buried inside a West Virginia mountain.
The course, presented at the Center for National Response, Gallagher, W. Va., is normally aimed at civilian fire and police departments, HAZMAT units, search and rescue teams, K-9, FBI, and Civil Support Teams. It has never been used to train active-duty Air Force personnel.
Realistic training is only part of the story.
Analysts at AFDW designed the training to validate new concepts and tactics, techniques and procedures in rescue operations under chemical, biological, and radiological conditions, according Kermit Kemmerer, AFDW CBRNE Policy analyst who evaluated much of the exercise.
"We've been working on this training concept for the past year and a half," he said. "And from what we observed, we were able to test some TTPs while developing new ones."
The main concept involves building a response team from a mixture of Air Force specialties and putting them in response situations that include the consequences of Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear, and high-yield Explosive or CBRNE attacks.
"The real focus of the training was to bring all participants together to respond as one team," Kemmerer said, "It was like nothing they have ever done before."
The team, called the "CBRNE Response Force" or CRF, is modeled after a team built in U.S. Air Forces Europe called the Full-Spectrum Threat Response Strike Team.
"We tweaked the FSTR team for a stateside response that has a different set of challenges," he said. "For example, our CRF team has to deal a lot more with OSHA and federal fire-fighting regulations."
In the CRF concept, the team will include Bioenvironmental Engineers from the Medical Wing, Readiness and Emergency Management Specialists from Civil Engineering, Explosive Ordnance technicians, and of course Fire Fighters.
Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Allen is a Fire-Fighter Crew Chief assigned to the 316th Civil Engineering Squadron here, who participated in the exercises at the West Virginia tunnel facility.
In nine years as a fire fighter, Sergeant Allen said he had never experienced training like this before, and was surprised from the very first minutes of the scenario.
"When we used our detectors down there," he said, "We got readings!"
In the more controlled, base-level exercises, a fire fighter will pull out a detector and wait for an observer/trainer to announce what the reading on the detector will be. But this exercise was more realistic.
"It made us wonder if we were getting live readings," he said. "So we were able to focus more on it and direct our thinking towards it and that was the biggest difference."
Despite the realism, his team would respond as normal by assessing the situation and determining what they are facing before they try to mitigate it.
Part of the CRF concept is to have the other team members and their unique skill sets on-scene with the firefighters from the beginning.
Another team member, Capt. Grant Cauthen, 79th Aerospace Medical Squadron bioenvironmental engineer, said the experience gave him "some of the best training (he) had during (his) six years in the Air Force."
One of the reasons he liked the training involved the time spent on each scenario.
"Normally in a base exercise, we get one entry into a hot zone and then see what happens," he said. "In this one, we did seven entries into the zone and things began to pop up that we had never considered before."
He gave the example of something that they now realize had long been taken for granted: batteries.
"At base-level exercises, we have them charging and we use them briefly and then we're done," he said. "In this exercise, we were using them over and over to the point where we had to plan for recharging them."
Due to their unique job, the fire department can only be away from the station during exercises by "compressing time" or briefing portions of the scenario, so some things are lost as a result of the artificial environment at the base level, according to Cauthen.
"The CNR allowed us to progress in an exercise almost all the way to completion," he said. "We practiced what we have been learning over the past several months in a realistic training venue and we are able to really reinforce the training we had gone through."
A key lesson learned by Capt. Cauthen also fit well with the goals of the exercise planners: Validating the CBRNE Response Force concept.
"Probably one of the best things to come out of the training was the increased teamwork between fire dept, readiness and emergency management, and bioenvironmental engineering," he said. "We learned each others strengths and weaknesses when we entered as a team and that's normally something we don't get during base-level exercises."
"AFDW plans to send teams here annually so we can achieve the highest level of preparedness possible," according to Col Brian Bellacicco, the Director of Installations and Mission Support for AFDW. "The facility and training are very impressive."
Col. Bellacicco, who observed parts of the most recent training exercise, also said the HQ Air Force Civil Engineer Readiness and Emergency Management Division plans to make all the major commands aware of this training and to encourage its use.
"We owe it to our first responders to give them every tool we can within our resources," he said. "This is valuable, cost effective training and the rest of the Air Force should take advantage of this facility."