<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  The rescuers are coming. For the past hour I&amp;#039;ve been pinned inside a tomblike cave of collapsed concrete, the result of a massive explosion in an underground parking garage. Finally, a voice echoes in the darkness: &amp;quot;Can anyone hear me?&amp;quot;  I let out a muffled &amp;quot;help&amp;quot; as I strain to see through a gap in the dusty rubble. Outside is more darkness, blowing smoke, and, 20 yards away, the promising beams of headlamps. &amp;quot;Help,&amp;quot; I shout again. &amp;quot;Over here.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Ma&amp;#039;am, we&amp;#039;ll be right there. We&amp;#039;re coming,&amp;quot; a young female voice bellows back in the dark. &amp;quot;Is there anyone with you?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;One, one more,&amp;quot; I scream. Sprawled out next to me in the dirt is a lifeless body, both legs twisted beneath it at impossible angles. In the distance, the sound of voices grows louder, along with the growl of jackhammers and the crack of metal bludgeoning rock. &amp;quot;All quiet,&amp;quot; a voice suddenly cries out.  &amp;quot;All quiet,&amp;quot; a chorus of several dozen repeats back in unison. Then, perfect calm.  &amp;quot;Ma&amp;#039;am, can you still hear us?&amp;quot; the young woman yells again, more clearly in the surrounding silence.  &amp;quot;My sister,&amp;quot; I cry.  &amp;quot;Is your sister still alive?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; I scream.  &amp;quot;All right. Stay calm,&amp;quot; she yells. &amp;quot;Ma&amp;#039;am, we&amp;#039;re with the U.S. Army Reserve. We&amp;#039;re here to help. We&amp;#039;re on our way!&amp;quot; The smoke, the dust, and the screams are real, but my sister is actually a vinyl dummy; my rubble cave, part of a complex set. I&amp;#039;m at the Center for National Response (CNR) in Gallagher, W.Va., where rescuers train to respond to domestic disasters inside an abandoned highway tunnel. A wide array of trainees\u2014from National Guard, Coast Guard, and Air Force teams to police officers, EMTs, and firefighters\u2014use the unique facility to learn to battle situations as diverse as earthquakes, terrorist bombings, train derailments, and highway accidents.  Today&amp;#039;s students are military, members of the Army&amp;#039;s 300th Chemical Company. I&amp;#039;ve spent the past few days watching them train under the direction of Dave Underwood, a tall, even-tempered former fire captain. Soldiers like these probably won&amp;#039;t be first on the scene in a big disaster, Underwood says, but they&amp;#039;ll provide the manpower and equipment to push on after the capability of local civilian first responders has been exhausted.  While the military has dozens of specialized training grounds nationwide, none is as versatile as the CNR for preparing specifically for domestic catastrophes. During my time there, several people refer to the facility as &amp;quot;a Disneyland for first responders.&amp;quot; The site includes 10,000 acres of dense woodland that hide a mock meth lab and a couple of rusty single-engine airplanes used to create crash scenarios. There&amp;#039;s a crowded lot full of trashed cars and trucks and a mountain of concrete blocks and rebar, all of it tools for the center&amp;#039;s dozen trainers. The CNR&amp;#039;s most valuable training ground, though, is the tunnel.  Chiseled into a mountain face in West Virginia coal country 60 years ago, the Memorial Tunnel was abandoned in the late 1980s when a new interstate was built nearby. In 2000, the property was acquired by the West Virginia National Guard and then converted into a multifaceted training facility with a staff that also takes its disaster-planning skills on the road. Today, the tunnel contains a mock train platform, several more illicit drug labs, a highway pileup involving a jackknifed big rig, a meandering plaster cave built to resemble mountain hide-outs in Afghanistan, and the only two subway cars in the state. At the far end of the tunnel is the hulking pile of concrete where I&amp;#039;ve voluntarily trapped myself. Smoke machines and the same massive fans that served the original tunnel blow damp waves of dusty air while dimmable lights force the rescuers to work in near darkness. It is cold and desolate. Though I can see groups of trainees slowly moving toward me from the front end of the pile, behind me is nothing but mountains of rubble strewn with mangled bodies. It&amp;#039;s a carefully constructed landscape. &amp;quot;We can create any light setting that they want,&amp;quot; Underwood says. &amp;quot;We can make wind. We can smoke the tunnel or put flame bars out. We can give them the realism that they need.&amp;quot; Many of these soldiers have yet to see a war zone, never mind a major domestic disaster. The goal of the tunnel training is to get them as ready as possible for the real thing.  &amp;amp;gt; CONTINUED &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;   The Army&amp;#039;s chemical companies were formed during World War I, charged with creating clouds of smoke to obscure troop movements and bridge construction and demolition\u2014maneuvers of conventional warfare that are now largely obsolete. (&amp;quot;The days of shooting rounds of mustard gas back and forth are over,&amp;quot; one reservist tells me.) As of January 2011, most chemical companies were officially renamed CBRN companies\u2014for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear\u2014and given a new mission: urban search and extraction. It&amp;#039;s part of a large-scale effort to train military forces to respond to domestic &amp;quot;white missions,&amp;quot; in addition to wartime &amp;quot;green missions.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Our goal is to improve upon our civil support to local firefighters and emergency-response units in a time of need,&amp;quot; Capt. Whinston Antion says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re looking at soldiers going into collapsed structures, rescuing someone trapped in a building, cutting people out of vehicles.&amp;quot; The 300th is the first chemical company to complete an intensive 10-week search and extraction training. This week, three of its four platoons are reviewing and honing those skills. The fourth focuses its training on a more traditional chemical company mission: hazmat reconnaissance. &amp;quot;Their main mission is to identify what a potential terrorist is trying to cook up,&amp;quot; Antion says.  The reservists&amp;#039; three-day session follows a &amp;quot;crawl, walk, run&amp;quot; format. On the first day I watch as a group of young soldiers practices roping and rappelling skills, which could be used to reach victims after a building collapse. One of the reservists helping to run the training is a baby-faced 21-year-old named James Hartman. As he spreads red climbing rope and carabiners across the blacktop outside the tunnel entrance, Spc. Hartman describes how this training has helped him in his civilian job as a volunteer firefighter. He recently extracted a car-accident victim using the Jaws of Life and also just completed his first rope rescue: &amp;quot;It turned out it was for a dog\u2014a Lab that was stuck on a cliff. I strapped him in and hauled him up,&amp;quot; Hartman says.  By the afternoon, the soldiers are rappelling off the face of the three-story tunnel. Given Hartman&amp;#039;s obvious mastery of the climbing hardware and knots, I quickly agree to serve as a guinea pig for their mock rescue attempts. Hartman secures my harness and explains how I should keep my weight back and my feet planted against the wall as soldiers haul me up and over the lip of the tunnel&amp;#039;s roof.  The next day I take a turn learning to slice through metal with a plasma torch, a tool whose safe use is demonstrated by a company member with a day job as a welder in a coal mine. The soldiers unpack brand-new axes, crowbars, and a 40-pound Jaws of Life metal cutter to rip apart a pile of crashed cars and extract the dummies that CNR staff have lodged inside. Terrorist attacks and natural disasters can also lead to situations where people become trapped in their cars. &amp;quot;Peel it like a can!&amp;quot; Staff Sgt. Josiah Saxe yells as a couple of soldiers struggle to pry off the rear end of a blue sedan.  Dummies recovered, my group moves on to the last station, where each soldier inserts earplugs, pulls goggles over his or her helmet, and attacks a concrete rubble pile with a jackhammer. Meanwhile, the recon platoon, dressed in puffy hooded hazmat-protection suits and back-mounted oxygen tanks, practices chemical sampling in one of the tunnel&amp;#039;s mock drug labs. Compared with many of the groups that train in the tunnel, these soldiers are amateurs. Ninety percent of the reservists have full-time civilian jobs; their normal commitment to the Army is one weekend a month and one two-week training session a year. But with thousands of troops nationwide, the Army chemical companies are poised to provide a lot of the muscle behind the broader military shift to white missions. The National Guard arguably plays an even bigger role. In the past few years the Guard has built up 57 Civil Support Teams, new groups of 22 full-time soldiers wholly dedicated to domestic disaster response. Those teams augment 17 larger groups known as CERFPs, each made up of approximately 180 part-time National Guardsmen. And as of last year, Homeland Response Force units, comprising more than 550 guardsmen, will serve each of the country&amp;#039;s 10 FEMA regions. At a time when military budgets are shrinking, the shift represents a significant reallocation of resources. The mandate to focus on domestic disaster was largely a reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In the decade since, the reality has sunk in that these soldiers are more likely to respond to a natural catastrophe\u2014or an accident. While at the tunnel, I hear references to Hurricane Katrina often. The devastating March 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan is on the trainers&amp;#039; minds, as are recent events close to home. Last year there were a record 14 U.S. natural disasters that each caused more than a billion dollars in damage, among them the monster tornado that hit Joplin, Mo., in May, and Hurricane Irene, which ravaged the Northeast in August. Meanwhile, there hasn&amp;#039;t been another significant domestic terrorist attack since 9/11. The design of the final day&amp;#039;s tunnel exercise ends up reflecting exactly this disconnect between expectation and reality. First the soldiers would be briefed on a massive explosion at the student center at West Virginia State University in nearby Charleston. Just hours before, they&amp;#039;d be told, the university had denied a permit to a group of Islamic students who wanted to conduct a protest outside the building. Officials suspect a connection between the events. Midway through the exercise, the soldiers would receive new information: The local utility had determined that a massive gas-line leak was responsible for the devastation. There was likely no terrorism after all. As Underwood and I climb into one of the CNR&amp;#039;s four-wheelers and head toward the far end of the tunnel, he sounds more like a theater tech than a fireman: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll start with an eerie glow and light smoke,&amp;quot; he says, his bright red Windbreaker luminous in the near-dark. We reach the hulking rubble pile, representing a collapsed parking garage beneath the student center. &amp;quot;The recon group will be semilit,&amp;quot; Underwood says. &amp;quot;As the search and extraction teams arrive, we&amp;#039;ll bring the lights up.&amp;quot; Those power-tool skills are a little too new to attempt with headlamps alone. We stop the four-wheeler and I scale the jagged pile of concrete, pulling on a spare helmet and a pair of work gloves. Underwood points out a couple of safe hiding spots; I choose one and lower myself into it. I&amp;#039;ve been hidden for close to an hour by the time that first rescuer reaches me. I have already recognized the approaching voice as that of Sheena Tillman, a petite college junior with stick-straight posture and a focused gaze. She hands me a disposable paper mask through a break in the concrete, then a second one for my &amp;quot;sister.&amp;quot; I lift the dummy gently from the dirt and snap the mask&amp;#039;s elastic around its bald head. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re gonna get you out, ma&amp;#039;am,&amp;quot; Sgt. Tillman says, throwing down a small, pen-shaped chemical light.  Tillman has been in the reserves for five years. She hasn&amp;#039;t been deployed. The tunnel, she&amp;#039;d told me earlier in the week, &amp;quot;is as close to real life as we can get so far.&amp;quot; She keeps me talking as additional members of her platoon debate the best tool to break open my concrete cage. At first they seem intimidated by the task. &amp;quot;This is easily 3000 pounds,&amp;quot; I hear one soldier say as he examines the concrete wall between us. Tillman jumps in to reassure me: &amp;quot;Ma&amp;#039;am, right now we&amp;#039;re just assessing your situation. We&amp;#039;re just looking for the fastest method to get you two out.&amp;quot;  The soldiers decide to use a plasma torch to slice through a steel plate that abuts the concrete. There are groups of rescuers all around now, all struggling to extract one of the two dozen dummies hidden in the rubble. Even though many of the mannequins are decrepit, some with missing limbs, the soldiers have been instructed to assume they are alive. As the first spray of sparks bursts through the cracks in the wall, I shift away from the heat. It takes 15 minutes before the sheet of metal is pried back and the soldiers reach in, grab me under the arms, and pull me onto a waiting litter. Then they lift me up and carry me to safety. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a7535/preparing-for-disaster-at-first-responders-boot-camp-7588642/>