You have Freepmail.
Also saw this at TB2000 public section-
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c...MNGG09CO721.DTL
There's an old saying in the military: It ain't raining, we ain't training. So what happened at this California National Guard base Tuesday counted as serious training.
Leaden skies dumped buckets of cold water on hundreds of Army and Air National Guard members throughout the day, providing an added measure of mud and chaos to the disaster scenario at hand. It was the kind of day Col. John Bernatz, who spent most of his 30 years in armored units, cheerfully calls "good tanking weather."
But it would have been deadly serious training in any case. The team Bernatz directs is one of a number launched this summer as a major component of the National Guard's response to a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction.
The federal government paid for 12 of these teams nationwide, including one in California, based in Orange County. But the California Guard decided it needed six, Bernatz said, because the Golden State has so many terrorist targets that the Guard may need to be in as many as six places at once, so five more are being trained, paid for by the Guard.
"We live in a new world today," he said. "We live in a world where an enemy has brought a war back to our shores."
The team training at Camp Roberts on Tuesday -- only the second in the state -- will be based in Sacramento and will be the primary responder for the Bay Area. Each team costs about $1.4 million to equip, Bernatz said, and about $500,000 a year to maintain. The team was assembled from Guard members taken from several units, including Company C, 297th Support Battalion, a medical company based in San Mateo, and the 95th Civil Support Team in Hayward.
The company-size teams of 122 soldiers are so novel that they are known by an acronym that contains an acronym. They are a CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear or High-Yield Explosive) Enhanced Response Force Package, or CERFP.
In an emergency, civil support teams like the one from Hayward will respond first and will quickly be followed by a CERFP, designed to assemble within six hours -- a tall order since the team is made up mainly of weekend Guard members.
That makes training like Tuesday's all the more important. The exercise followed a fictional scenario in which a private airplane sprayed an unknown agent on the crowd at an Oakland Raiders game and a suitcase bomb tainted with radioactive material exploded in the stands. Hypothetical results: 2,000 injured, unknown numbers dead, 35,000 flee -- contaminated -- back to the Bay Area.
As the rain beat down, volunteer victims wearing a horrifying host of mock injuries were trucked to the scene, where Guard members in bioterror suits screened them for contaminants, treated their wounds and decontaminated their shivering bodies with water in specially designed tents before taking them away for medical treatment. The team's goal is to treat and decontaminate 60 patients an hour.
Some of those on the team were assigned, but many volunteered, including Capt. Daniel Heany of Clayton. Heany said he was drawn to the unit in part because he has a new child and the CERFP members may not be deployed overseas during their 24-month tour, but also because the mission tied into the reason he joined the Guard in the first place.
"A lot of us got into the National Guard for national defense," he said. "You go into it expecting this kind of scenario."
Many team members shook their heads sympathetically at the wretched volunteers as they stripped to their shorts in the rain and mud, but "victims" like Staff Sgt. Dwayne Ball, completing his fourth trip through decontamination, said it was worth the misery.
"If we have a national disaster, we're going to be able to help people out. They're going to need it," he said, shivering under a gray Army blanket at the end of the decontamination line. "It's hard to prepare for something like this. You never know when it's going to happen."