Disaster city: emergency responders hone skills amid the rubble.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Homeland Security - National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center

COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Removing a one-ton jagged piece of broken concrete is not an easy task--especially when there are no cranes.

One of the first skills firefighters and other first responders learn at the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center is how to hoist a slab of concrete off a rubble pile using only their muscles.

They pull the concrete up "exactly the way we think the Egyptians did it," said Brian Smith, public information officer for Texas Task Force One.

They use lumber to create an A-frame around the slab, suspend the load underneath, and then use leverage to lift it off.

This is training, but in the real world, there might be a disaster victim underneath.

"Initially, you are not going to have cranes. You're going to be at an incident 24 hours before cranes show up, so you have to do a lot of these things by hand," Smith said.

The seeds of this training center were planted after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 when Texas needed a location to prepare its Task Force One team, which was set up to respond to similar disasters.

Since then it has evolved into a facility that welcomes firefighters, weapons of mass destruction response teams and other first responders from throughout the United States and overseas.

It has taught more than 5,000 WMD/ terrorism incident courses to some 200,000 emergency responders from 8,200 local and state jurisdictions.

Since 9/11, it has received an infusion of Department of Homeland Security grant money to help it expand its courses and facilities.

It sits next to one of the largest firefighter training facilities in the world, the Texas Engineering Extension Service's Brayton Fire Training Field, but is a separate entity. Urban search and rescue has always been considered a secondary skill set for firefighters, but with the threat of terrorist attacks, recent devastating hurricanes, and the ever-present possibility of major earthquakes, more fire departments are sending personnel to training facilities such as NERRTC to learn how to extract victims from collapsed buildings or rubble piles.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Basic skills learned during the first few days of the course are: breaching and breaking--to bust through buildings; shoring, which prevents the structure from collapse; and lifting and moving pieces of debris.

For the lifting and moving course, trainers devised what they call "the mousetrap," a giant puzzle of concrete slabs. When one side is lifted, the other end...