Working in conjunction with the West Metro Fire District and Colorado Task Force-One (CO-TF1), the Colorado National Guard’s CERF-P conducted a validation exercise Aug. 5-7 at the new West Metro Fire Training Recue Center in Lakewood, Colo., to certify the team is capable of responding to real-world missions within six hours.

CO-TF1 set up an incident site complete with destroyed vehicles, large mountains of concrete rubble and civilian role players covered in mock burns, bruises, cuts and contusions. Various scenarios were conducted to teach – and ultimately certify – that Colorado’s CERF-P is relevant and ready to respond, said Travis Dauer, a weapons of mass destruction exercise planner and acting incident commander for the event. 

So what exactly is CERF-P?

“This is, in layman’s terms, a HAZMAT team that has a Guard capability to augment local first responders – specifically to enhance their reaction to a large-scale HAZMAT event,” said Army Maj. Christopher Mckee, the plans and training officer for the Colorado Army National Guard. “CERF-P brings a large-scale extraction and decontamination ability (if) local firemen and first responders are quickly overwhelmed. … We augment their response.” 

CERF-P has five primary capabilities: medical, which provides evaluation and triaging for evacuation; decontamination; search and extraction, which searches for victims and extracts them from collapsed structures; and command and control.

More than 200 Citizen-Soldiers and -Airmen of the joint unit are predominantly traditional Guardsmen who drill one weekend a month along with at least two weeks of annual training a year. They perform this community-based response capability as an additional duty. 

“These aren’t Soldiers from an active duty post,” McKee said. “These are Citizen-Soldiers that are on site six hours from activation.”

All of the military personnel participating serve in the Guard, including the evaluators from the Joint Interagency Training and Education Center. 

“CERF-P brings a lot of capabilities to the fight that local civilian agencies might not have, such as mass (decontamination) support, mass extraction and mass medical and basic triage,” Dauer said. “They are able to process a large quantity of victims in a short period of time.”

Military and civilian first responders have different equipment, so they train together in such exercises to build partnerships, leading to interagency cooperation and coordination that improves safety – and ultimately saves lives. 

“This exercise builds and enforces our relationship with the Colorado National Guard, which helps the Task Force when responding to local, state and national disasters with the Guard,” said Rod Tyus, CO-TF1 program manager. “Building these relationships prior to an event is extremely important and we are very fortunate to have training opportunities like this one to make this happen.”

CO-TF1 is made up of civilian firefighters, medical personnel, dog handlers and structural engineers along the Front Range who are trained to conduct urban search and rescue operations for local, state and national disasters. Like the CERF-P, CO-TF1 is another unit that would be called upon if an incident requires more assets than local first responders can provide. 

Certification for CERF-P units is critical, so extreme measures were taken to make the exercise as realistic as possible. The incident site – provided by CO-TF1 – realistically simulated a contaminated area in collapsed parking structure known as the “hot zone.”

The incident site looked like a bomb had been dropped next to Highway 285. Mounds of rubble were strewn about along with vehicles that had been pummeled and smashed to pieces. Scattered around all the debris and devastation were civilian role players, moaning and screaming in pain, covered in bleeding wounds and bruises – all realistically simulated, of course. Role player Julia Muench said she was so dedicated to making the scenario real that she even got herself to cry while on a litter. 

The incident itself was a hypothetical terrorist attack that involved biological, radiological and chemical weapons on top of a structure that collapsed and trapped victims. 

CERF-P troops arriving on the scene dressed in gear to protect them from CBRNE effects (such as radiation or dangerous chemicals), performed immediate first aid on the casualties. Once an initial assessment of the CBRNE risk was made, the injured civilians were taken to a decontamination tent, then processed through medical triage and treatment. While the protective gear is essential to protecting the first responders, it also makes their efforts more difficult. Vision is limited inside the plastic suit and breathing apparatuses are heavy and bulky. Once properly sealed inside the suit, the outdoor temperatures of 90-plus degrees start climbing rapidly. Dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke are all major risks for CERF-P members at the incident site. They risk becoming casualties themselves.

“From the onset – particularly with the search and extraction – (the team) hit the ground very motivated in nature,” said Capt. Shane Duffield, CERF-P training company commander for the JITEC. “I’m very impressed with their willingness to get better and succeed out here. They’ve had long days; it just proves that they’re very resilient in nature.” 

A cornerstone of the Colorado National Guard’s value is that servicemembers live and work in the communities they protect.

“I absolutely love this mission, it means the world to me,” said Army Sgt. Stephen Delp, a Colorado CERF-P search and extraction operations noncommissioned officer. “We are Citizen-Soldiers. We serve the people of the United States and this is just one more way that we can serve them more efficiently, more effectively, impact lives and mitigate suffering and loss of life.”

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