Baltimore Sun

Search the Baltimore County community newspaper archives

>> Click here to search for stories published AFTER 2011

>> Use this search box to find stories published prior to 2011.

Note: All Words is a more strict search. Implied operator is "AND."
Ex: Charles Dickens"

news

home

Dealing with deadly materials at APG

BY BRYNA ZUMER

Posted 12/02/09

The workings of the Army’s many programs on Aberdeen Proving Ground’s nearly 73,000 acres are not often visible to the general public.

But the Army has recently been offering a glimpse into the operations of one of its newer commands, which has a particularly timely mission and happens to be based at the Edgewood Area of Aberdeen Proving Ground.

The 20th Support Command, launched in 2004, deals specifically with response to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosives, and is therefore called the CBRNE command.

The organization holds demonstrations every few months for government officials and other privileged personnel.

Tuesday, it hosted such a demonstration — called a capabilities exercise, or “capex” — for the media.

“Everything we do is organic to our organization,” said Roger Teel, public affairs officer for the command, who explained that the organization would not be affected by the oncoming changes of BRAC.

“We will be the sustaining soldier base for [APG],” he said, a reference to the fact that most of the future BRAC-related growth at APG is related to civilian operations, while much of the post’s military mission is being moved elsewhere.

Not so with CBRNE, however.

The command was launched with 1,500 personnel and has since grown to about 5,000 spread throughout a number of subordinate units around the country and in Iraq and Afghanistan: two ordnance groups, a chemical brigade with five battalions, an ordnance company dealing with weapons of mass destruction and a new group called CARA.

Short for CBRNE Analytical and Remediation Activity and fully operational as of this year, CARA uses civilian personnel to do remediative or restorative operations, provide analytical laboratory support, technical escort and to counter threats posed by explosives and weapons of mass destruction.

Col. Thomas Cartledge, chief of staff for the command, said using CARA has been less intrusive or alarming in responding to potentially hazardous situations, such as recovering chemical warfare materiel from a previous conflict, than sending out a group of soldiers.

“It’s much better if our civilian organization goes down. It’s less threatening,” he said.

At its demonstration Tuesday, off Fairview Point Road near the Edgewood gate, several hours were spent showing the type of work the organization does.

A group of soldiers staged an enactment of their response to a hypothetical situation in which coalition forces find what appears to be a clandestine chemical weapons production lab.

At the entrance of a small wooden house used for display purposes, one soldier cracked open the door and checked it with an air monitor, which simultaneously relayed information about the building’s air contents to his team leader.

Other soldiers then came in to search the room to ensure it was safe for the sample team to come inside, a procedure that can sometimes take hours in reality.

The sample team demonstrated taking photos of the potentially hazardous material, collecting samples and using parafilm to seal each in a jar.

The group then went outside for a decontamination process, carefully having their suits removed by fellow soldiers, avoiding cross-contamination and getting checked by a monitor for contamination.

Another team member, meanwhile, transferred the chemical sample to a special metal canister to be transported to a testing lab.

After that demonstration, other soldiers, who included health physicists and EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) leaders, went through a series of exhibits on how their divisions worked.

A mobile nuclear disablement team, which has so far not gotten much use but is ready to go in case of an actual nuclear incident, showed off its radiation detection and disablement equipment, including a smaller system that can be placed on a utility vehicle and driven around.

In an indoor demonstration room, soldiers also talked about the type of equipment they used, including EOD bomb suits (weighing about 90 pounds), a pulse wave X-ray machine, battering rams and chopsaws, a “portable isotopic neutron-spectroscopy” detector, a multi-gas monitor and a robot that does reconnaissance, or scouting, work.

The 20th command was designed to become the Army’s primary source of specialized capabilities in responding to these types of threats.

Its primary mission has also, so far, been overseas with programs like Task Force Troy and Task Force Palladin in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is extremely lean on support structure — Cartledge described the organization as 5,000 technical experts — and has niche capabilities like weapons technical intelligence, which involves doing forensics before or after a blast.

Information about the specifics of how a weapon came to be is one of the things the Army wants to retain from Iraq, Cartledge said.

The forensics “gives us information about individual actors and program of how it was designed,” he said.