Agencies conduct simulated terror attacks in Grants

By Jim Maniaci
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — Tribal, state, county, city and village agencies learned a tremendous lesson Friday when a simulated one-two punch of domestic terrorist attacks hit the west and east sides of Grants about an hour apart.

To avoid an Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" Halloween-style panic, all the communications at the county justice complex just east of Grants were kept on internal frequencies.

Consultant Clark Reynolds is writing up his after-action report for county emergency manager Peggy Jordan about the drill headquartered at the emergency operations center in the Sheriff's Office squad room.

And the practice Emergency Operations Center Manager Ken Tiller of the Laguna Emergency Management Department commented Monday, "It was a big success. The participants got a good eye-view of what they need to do and how important it is to be the support for the incident command post in the field, to be able to provide the resources."

He added the EOC staff learned, "How fast (resources) can be depleted if not managed right. The EOC needs to keep track of the resources it has available."

Those around the central table included the manager, an operations chief (Cibola County Sheriff Manuel Lujan), the deputy operations manager (Undersheriff Johnny Valdez), and about nine coordinators of various functions, plus "scribes" who condensed the mountains of information coming in on the telephones while writing it up legible enough to easily be read across the room and the runners bringing additional information from the radio room.

Although this was a drill, two mobile command center trailers were set up in the parking lots, one from Jordan's office and one from the Grants Fire-Rescue Department, to imitate incident command posts in the field.

Everything was scored by evaluators Bill Martin of Lincoln County, Don Cooper, Kristi Phillips and Bert Jensen, all of San Juan County.

In the morning, Reynolds took everyone through the pre-plan notebooks, schooling them on what each job entailed. After a sandwich lunch provided by the American Red Cross, the drill began in earnest with a New Mexico State Police officer reporting a train derailment at El Morrow Street with 40 cars off the BNSF tracks, several on fire and one leaking a green gas with a hazardous materials number 1017 deadly chlorine gas. Several people already were dead at the scene.

As the EOC was set up, resources arrived at the scene, conducting evacuations and other emergency response activities.

But then Tiller, Lujan, Valdez and company got blindsided a call came in from a Grants Police Department Officer of an explosion in the main hall of the Best Western during a convention. Several people were killed.

Somehow, law enforcement agencies determined home-grown domestic terrorists the kind of people who hate government had pulled off both attacks.

But with most of the resources committed to the first tragedy, there wasn't much help for the first responders to the second disaster.

This led Tiller whose agency went through a railroad derailment for real in May 2003 to note, "The EOC needs to keep track of resources. Everybody's eyes were really opened."

He added that Friday's events were the second level of training for people in the county. First was a table top exercise small cards moved about on a table to indicate what is going on. Second was what he called "the functional training" or Friday's drill. Later Jordan explained early next year will be a full-scale, in the field, dress rehearsal exercise with people playing victims with make up applied to show their injuries.

Sheriff Lujan called his time in the EOC, "Very intense. It took me by surprise. I like to be out in the field. It was very nerve-wracking; too many things going on at one time and you don't know which one has priority. At the beginning of the session, it was very wild. Our first group did allocate too much resources to the first disaster site; we were running out of resources (for the second) but did the best we could with what we had. If you want to go through a stress thing, this was it."

Jordan said the purpose of the drill was to "look at how well information was being gathered, tracked and how well the EOC people were using it to solve the problem."

In the debriefing at the end of the afternoon, she said the group concluded they had been overwhelmed.

"There were a lot of messages coming in. They learned a lot and now have a better idea how to perform in a disaster. But it was hard to make (those) decisions. Today I'm hearing, 'we can do better'," Jordan said.

She added, "The controller (Reynolds) said they need to learn to prioritize messages, to make the decisions easier on themselves. Everyone was pleased with the way they all worked together across jurisdictional boundaries and how happy they were to work together. Of course, we all had the same goal, to save our people."

Jordan said about 70 people, the most ever, participated. This included Acoma Pueblo Gov. Stanley Paytiamo and Laguna Pueblo Lt. Gov. Virgil Siow, along with police, fire and ambulance members from Acoma, Cibola County, Grants, Laguna, Milan and New Mexico. None of the area's federal agencies took part and the railroad was not able to attend.

— To contact Jim Maniaci, telephone (505) 285-6184 or (505) 870-7775 (cellular).