Virginia's Civil Support Team tests its readiness.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

On a rain-swept military base in Virginia Beach this summer, members of the Virginia National Guard's 34th Civil Support Team (Weapons of Mass Destruction)--in bulky, airtight protective "moon suits"--struggled to retrieve a stretcher-borne casualty.

The casualty, one of their own, had been injured while investigating what seemed to be a pipe bomb and a suspicious looking powder. The team was required to recover the injured person, test him for contamination, decontaminate him and treat his injuries. It was part of a one-day exercise designed to test the team's readiness to handle chemical, biological and nuclear incidents.

Currently, there are 32 such teams around the country. They are designed to help state and local emergency units respond to WMD-related events. (related story p. 36) Virginia's team stood up in 2000 and was certified as fully mission capable in January 2002, according to its commander, Lt. Col. Colleen Chipper.

"Every 18 months, they run an exercise for every CST to evaluate our skills," she told National Defense. As it turned out, this exercise had to be conducted in a driving rainstorm. "It's just as well," she said. "We have to be able to operate in any kind of weather."

The CST--headquartered at Fort Pickett, southwest of Richmond--consists of 22 fulltime members of Virginia's Army and Air Guard, Chipper said. They bring to the team a wide range of specialties, including nuclear, biological and chemical technologies; medicine; communications; systems analysis; logistics, and administration, she said.

"Each team member gets about 700 hours of WMD-related training," Chipper said. Classes are provided by several Defense Department schools, the Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Fire Academy. The team conducts monthly exercises in coordination with local first responders.

The team has two major pieces of mobile equipment--an analytical laboratory and a communications van. The lab enables the team to identify chemical and biological agents in the field. The process is much faster than sending samples to a central state lab, Chipper said.

The team recently received two new additions for the lab. An FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) can identify chemical molecules and rule out biological molecules in about a minute. The FTIR is ruggedized and about the size of a shoebox.

A PCR (polymerase chain reaction) identifies biological warfare agents, such as anthrax, ricin, small pox and botulinum...