By By JAMES COLLINS / Niles Daily Star
BUCHANAN -- About 15 volunteer victims lay relatively motionless on the hill along Buchanan's General Machine Services property for hours as the 2004 Berrien County Weapons of Mass Destruction exercise got underway on Tuesday.
As they took their places on the ground a little after 2 p.m., a crew came around with red paint to freshen up their fake wounds in an attempt to make the drill as realistic as possible.
To add to the realism, smoke generators and simulated noisemakers for gunfire and explosions were used at the site. Additional causalities and injuries were also represented with mannequins and "Crash Kelleys," which were provided by the Kalamazoo Center for Medical Studies.
The exercise is the second in a series intended to improve Berrien County's overall emergency response capabilities. In September, a similar exercise took place at Andrew's University.
The six-hour drill, which involved at least 25 agencies and 130 participants from across the county, was the first part of a two-day exercise designed to help law enforcement agencies and emergency response units become more prepared for the possibility of a weapons of mass destruction attack.
Berrien County Commissioner Jeanette Leahey, who is one of the exercise's evaluators, was on site to look at the effectiveness of communication, the incident command system, the triage area, crime scene management and decontamination operations.
Berrien County Medical Examiner Dr. Rober Clark, who is the chief evaluator of the exercise, said the intent of the exercise was to meet the requirements of all of the different agencies that would be involved in an incident like this.
The arrival of a few speeding police cars and the arrest of a fictitious perpetrator was the only action on the scene for the first few hours of the exercise.
But, county officials explained that the seemingly slow start was because it takes time to prepare for such a disaster. A perimeter has to be established, the possibility of a continued threat must be assessed and a plan of action must be designed before everyone rushes into the scene to confront the situation.
Leahey said the fact that no one was in real danger was another contributing factor to why there seemed to be no sense of urgency in the early stages of Tuesday's drill.
Lt. Mike Bradley, Berrien County Emergency Management Controller, said the cost of the two-day exercise is $17,000 and is paid for through Homeland Security grants.
He said law enforcement agencies and emergency response departments were notified of the drill in some capacity about four months ago.
While day one was concerned with the initial response to a terrorist attack, day two of the exercise will deal with the medical response at Lakeland Hospitals in both Niles and St. Joseph.