Rescuers train to be Army’s rubble-rousers
Unit practices building collapses, chemical crises in mountain tunnel
By Kelly Kennedy
Times staff writer
STANDARD, W.Va. — When a plane crashed into the Pentagon in 2001, smoke billowed through passageways, flames spewed from jet fuel, and concrete and glass created seemingly insurmountable piles of rubble.
The Military District of Washington Engineer Company — the only Army unit trained to conduct tunnel and mine rescues — helped bring people trapped inside the building to safety.
The unit is tasked with rescuing senior leadership, including the president, should similar emergencies strike Washington.
“Their sole function in life is, if anything goes down in D.C., their job is to go in and extract people,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Frank McCoy. “When I first got to this unit, I said, ‘Whoa, this is unusual.’ But they’re good. Very good.”
McCoy is the command sergeant major for the air operations group of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington.
Though its training has ramped up since the Sept. 11 attacks, the company has not had to perform a real mission since.
But the engineers keep training.
In mid-June, trainers at the West Virginia Memorial Tunnel and Center for National Response created scenarios that ranged from collapsed buildings to chemical warfare labs to a suicide bombing in a subway to provide realistic scenarios for 33 of 72 soldiers attached to the company and eight civilian firefighters.
As Joe Earley, director of training for the center, led soldiers through the tunnel, they encountered Bubba’s Bathtub Lab, a trailer with a sheet hanging in a window for a curtain — and a meth lab in the kitchen.
Another lab showcased chemical warfare agents with small doses of the individual ingredients of chemical agents so that chemical-detection equipment could get actual readings. “They’re such minute amounts that they can’t harm anything,” Earley explained.
Trainers try to make the labs as realistic as possible, with chemical books lying open, labeled bottles and rooms hidden behind closets.
At the professional lab, where terrorists “manufacture” (fake) agents such as anthrax, there are clues for trainees as to what sort of operation they have come upon: microscopes, thermostats and a fist-size bug-in-a-jar named and labeled “Ross.”
Earley laughed and said he didn’t know what Ross might be used for.
Next up, a blood-soaked tissue underneath a National Guard recruiting poster was part of a scene for a suicide bombing in a subway station. And a mannequin’s hand helped soldiers trying to inventory bodies and parts after a disaster.
“It’s more high-speed than any other training I’ve done,” said Spc. Hattie Lynch, a heavy construction equipment operator who has been with the unit since February. “It’s pretty precise because you have to know exactly where to make the cuts with the torch, or you don’t want your sledgehammer to go all the way through because the wall might collapse.”
Lynch also said she didn’t realize she was “a little claustrophobic” until she spent some time in the tunnel.
Tunnel closed in 1987
The two-lane, half-mile-long West Virginia Memorial Tunnel was built in 1953 to get drivers on the West Virginia Turnpike through the mountains. But it closed in 1987 when it was bypassed by Interstate 77. In December 2000, the Center for National Response, funded by the Army National Guard, conducted its first exercise there.
Everyone from local firefighters to the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and military organizations train at the site, and technicians can change wind directions, smoke density, fire intensity and scenery.
“We’ve been able to do the whole spectrum — almost every skill in depth,” said Capt. Frank Tedeschi, commander of the MDW Engineer Company as he watched a soldier lift a mannequin in a rope harness out of a drainage ditch and up the side of the tunnel. “The biggest things are lifting and lowering and patient packaging, along with rope use, confined space and assisted air.”
Because the soldiers get to train with civilians at the tunnel, they get better feedback, Tedeschi said. His soldiers stay in the unit for one to three years, while civilian firefighters have been at their jobs longer and work real missions more often.
The MDW Engineers are part of the 12th Aviation Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Va., and they train at the center once every year.
Further into the tunnel, the lights grew dimmer and the smoke denser. Soldiers clambered over rubble into Fiberglas caves filled with an enemy weapons cache and an interrogation room.
Then, ripped-apart blocks of concrete and steel underneath blown-up cars suggested the destruction of a “dirty bomb.”
“We go back about another 100 feet of death,” Earley said.
In another area of the tunnel, actors screamed for help from inside a construction simulating the ventilation duct system of a skyscraper.
“It’s a pretty good maze in here,” said 1st Lt. Shawn Polonkey of the MDW Engineers. “Normally, we know what training we’re going to do. Here, everyone’s thrown for a loop — you never know what you’re going to get.”