Thursday, June 4, 1998 | 10:21 a.m.
FRENCHMAN FLAT -- For Las Vegas Fire Department battalion chief Richard Gracia, Wednesday started with a bang.
A simulated terrorist's bomb exploded at the Nevada Test Site's Hazardous Materials Spill Center, signaling the start of a biological and chemical exercise involving 31 members of federal, state and local emergency crews.
The first counter-terrorism course sponsored by Bechtel Nevada put participants through classroom courses in biological, chemical and radioactive threats before putting them into the field.
Under the scenario, a former chemical company employee-turned-terrorist had hurled everything from radiation to nerve gas into the area.
There aren't many places outside the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where explosives, smoke and chemicals can simulate a real-world disaster, said John Spahn, program manager for the Department of Energy's hazardous materials spill center.
When Gracia arrived at the scene, 13 people writhed in fake agony, crying for help. A hazardous materials team wearing bulky protective suits discovered by using a monitor the size of a briefcase that the culprit causing their suffering was VX, the standard U.S. nerve gas.
"The challenge is to put the classroom lessons into use during a field exercise," Gracia said, as police, firefighters and physicians moved cautiously into the contaminated scenario. "Everything has been an obstacle."
The DOE spent $60,000, and the Federal Emergency Management Administration contributed $18,000 to this exercise, coordinating it with Nevada's emergency management team. The next exercise is scheduled for Aug. 31 through Sept. 3 at the Test Site.
David Harrison, retired Army colonel with 30 years' experience as assistant commandant at the Army's Fort McClellan chemical school in Alabama, said most communities can not handle a terrorist threat. "If doctors don't know how to handle the contamination, they can spread it through a clinic or hospital," he said.
If the Test Site becomes a national center for counter-terrorism, it will offer a place for paramedics, doctors, firefighters, police, sheriff's deputies and federal agents to test their knowledge and skills. The Justice Department is asking for $10 million in 1999 to develop better local emergency responses.
Microbiologists fear that an infectious disease deliberately released by terrorists in the United States might spread throughout the country before public health officials recognize it. By then, a second wave of illnesses could attack health workers and others exposed unwittingly to the early victims.
In fact the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has considered the possibility that terrorists planted the germs of recent disease outbreaks.
Under suspicion were the 1993 outbreak of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in the United States, the 1994 outbreak of plague in India and a 1995 outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Zaire.
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