By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

Pflugerville firefighters joined the rest of the Travis County Hazardous Material Response Team to minimize the risk of dangerous chemicals during a regional emergency operation training exercise in Round Rock Nov. 3.

The Round Rock Police department’s emergency operations center was fully activated for the drill as the communication hub for all units involved in the mission to track down chemical terrorists.

Police and fire units from cities across Williamson and Travis county worked side by side with hazardous-materials teams, the Austin bomb squad, the FBI and the Army National Guard to respond to a mock-emergency scenario at the Bushy Creek regional water treatment plant.

“Part of why you do the exercise is so that in a real event you know who to call, you’ve got those numbers handy to get the resources you need – not just within the city, but up through Williamson county, throughout the state of Texas and beyond,” said Round Rock communications director Will Hampton.

The drill began when Round Rock patrol officers stationed near the treatment plant responded to a chlorine gas leak simulated by smoke generators sending clouds of would-be deadly chlorine gas into the air.

As the Travis County hazmat team worked to contain the ersatz chlorine they elevated the emergency response level when they detected that the release of poisonous chemicals was not a leak but an act of terrorism.

Observers evaluated the units as they worked their way through the scenario, tracking communication between teams at the emergency cite and intelligence officers working in the RRPD emergency operations center.

“Everyone on a daily basis works well within their own group, but an exercise like this is an opportunity to have them work together, because that’s what has to happen when a real incident occurs,” emergency management coordinator Brad Bradford said.

Lt. Richard Johnson was a lead controller of the exercise and one of six people who knew the plot of the scenario prior to the drill. He said it is important that details about the exercise be kept secret to surprise the participants like a real emergency would.

“If we have a failure point we want to know what it is in a drill, so everybody came in blind. We found that we know how to do the big stuff – it’s the fine tuning so far that needs to be taken care of . . . things like making sure your equipment is operable on a daily basis,” Johnson said.

Johnson helped design the scenario complete with smoke clouds, backpacks containing pipe bombs, dummy’s lying “dead” next to spilled buckets of unknown chemicals and envelopes containing cornstarch to simulate anthrax.

This year’s emergency tested the region’s CBRNE task force (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosives), but the emergency operations center is designed to deal with many disaster scenarios. The last time the Round Rock emergency operations center was fully activated for a real emergency was during hurricane Ike.

The organizations that participated in the exercise will give a final report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where the organizations’ will be evaluated on their use of federal grant money.

“It definitely has an effect on funding. We have to show the federal government that we are performing and we are using their money wisely,” Johnson said.