Agencies deal with mock terrorist attack

By Brian McBride
Associate Editor

What now?

That was what a number of Central Florida public safety agencies were working to answer Tuesday when they were faced with a mock threat of an international terrorist cell hiding out on local soil.

A full-scale exercise conducted at an empty hotel on Vine Street in Kissimmee, which included Osceola County police and fire agencies as well as surrounding county units such as SWAT and hazardous material teams, simulated a hostile environment that included a weapons shootout, improvised explosive devices and a chemical agent being used.

The parking lot at Kmart, 2009 W. Vine St., was covered in a sea of emergency response vehicles, as the agencies conducted the four-hour drill that began at 9 a.m. Public safety officials were put in the unscripted scenario exercise to be evaluated on how they could handle a terrorist plot.

Could that be a reality here in Central Florida? In 2008, according to published reports, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that the FBI had uncovered small groups of Al Qaida terrorists in the United States, although he declined to provide details.

“It's definitely a possibility with the state of affairs today,” Osceola County Sheriff's Office Capt. Bobby Yawn said.

The event started with a controlled explosion at the hotel that, according to the drill, was supposed to be terrorists detonating a device causing a partial structural collapse at the hotel. Later, an Osceola Sheriff's Office SWAT team assembled with weapons drawn and approached the hotel in single file to face off against the mock terrorists. Slowly, the team snaked around the motel, setting off a police flash grenade near one of the rooms.

The exercise was meant to test the response capabilities that included rapid and accurate notification and communications, command and control responsibilities and information sharing among all regional participating agencies.

“There is no pass or fail,” Kissimmee Fire Chief Bob King said. “Working side by side is the big thing.”

An evaluation also will be based on public information and warning, triage, treatment and transportation, decontamination operations, site security and crowd control.

“We will look at our weak points and our strong points and then evaluate our training,” Yawn said.

The exercise was a program hosted by the Orlando/Orange Urban Area Security Initiative that is made up of the city of Orlando and Orange, Osceola, Brevard, Lake Seminole and Volusia counties and also coordinated by the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council and the Emergency Response Educators and Consultants, a firm that will issue a report to the participating agencies on how well they performed. That should be completed in about 30 days, firm public information coordinator Ann Rowe-McMullen said.

“This is to look at regional coordination in response to an event,” she added.

The test was one of three conducted in Central Florida through a $265,000 federal grant.