Grand Ole CBRNE


there, but in Nashville there genuinely seems to be a level of trust between the departments. Michael Armistead explained: “We operate as a combined team. We have been pushing for Nashville PD to come over here and be in the same building as us. We are good friends and one of the better relationships that I can speak of compared to other cities our size. Usually there seems to be a power struggle, but here we don’t have that.” Chief Clymer agreed: “PD handles the


EOD and we handle the hazmat, but on a big event we’ll work jointly under a unified command and if it is a crowd we give the lead to the police and then if something goes wrong they can hand it over to us if it is mass casualty etc. We understand that situations can grow too rapidly for one agency to handle, so we have made an effort with all agencies local including public works, so we are training up their riggers and crane operators in urban search and rescue. We have tried to get everyone involved and come together as a city, so for instance we’ll include General Services that supply tankers of fuel for when we get deployed. “Instead of brothers fighting for a


piece of pie, we realise that we need each other, especially when something goes wrong. When we went down to Texas [for hurricane relief] we had county sheriffs with us for protection, when we did Florida I had Metro PD with us. While they had urban search and rescue (USAR) skills, as well as mapping, charting and other skill sets, we wanted them for force protection as you never know what you are getting into. They have four hazmat specialists and they are trying to learn what we do, though we are not trying to learn what they do! It has worked real well, as long as we can keep the egos out of it.” Egos do tend to be the traditional


problem. Over the life of the magazine I have visited various cities that have had excellent relations between police and fire, only to revisit a few years later to find them at each other’s throats. Chief Clymer agreed that it could be a problem, but the response could be blunt: “You need to weed those jerks out!” Michael Armistead suggested that it hadn’t been a quick process, and was in


a state of constant improvement. “There has been a build-up of trust in the last few years, they know they can trust us not to broadcast intelligence anywhere and or especially on Facebook! A lot of personalities have known each other for a long time, and that helps a lot.” Chief Clymer agreed, and stated that


it takes time to work, not only on the ground, but up the command chain too. “I am personal friends with my equivalent in the PD, his boss made it easier for him to communicate with me and mine did the same, so we were able to bring the two entities together. It’s the little things you do. We have a facility that is downtown next to a major venue, they have these big ATV’s and instead of them trailing them in and out I told them they were welcome to park them at our facility. It started out with two, and now they have a dozen, and we give them room and a place to charge their batteries, and they come over and clean them up before an event in the wash bay. “They are fixing to do their mask fit


testing for their air purifying respirators, and they have 1,600 officers and have a company coming in and they will do eight days straight to get all the officers through. But they are down a machine and reached out to me so I have received approval and will help them out with one of our mask fit testing sets. Their SCBA had a different manufacturer, so I talked them into using the same SCBA so they have the same ones as us and I now have permission to support and maintain their equipment through our air shop as we have three full time people and all they do is maintain and service airpacks. It is the little things that you do back and forth that makes the difference.” These little building blocks of trust


are slowly creating a blockhouse of interoperability that is strong enough to weather the barrage of outside political interference. It is also making a difference in procurement with the fire service’s latest radiation detection equipment coming via a police procurement that they could piggy back on. The fire service reciprocated by allowing the PD and waterworks to utilise a service contract they have on


their boats. As the core team bring in other agencies like public works and waterworks it allows a stronger partnership and greater awareness of each other’s capabilities, which is essential in a CBRN incident. Chief Clymer explained how it


worked with the wider community: “We are working on something now for a white powder call in a judge’s chamber for the sheriff office and the courthouse. Even though there is a protocol they want some training. Public works and waterworks, we try and do their confined entry and hazmat classes to keep them trained to meet their requirements. If it is something we can help a department with it usually comes back, so if I am doing a trench class I will try and go out of my way to get waterworks as they will offer us their facilities or they have a big backhoe that they will dig me some trenches. You need to work relationships to keep them strong, but it pays dividends.” While people can offer assistance and


be helpful, the way respect is earned is by being on the same calls and doing a professional job. For Nashville, with the exception of hazmat, the most common call is fentanyl, which has doubled in recent years. Like many areas in the US drug addicts have got out of meth and into fentanyl, which with its higher toxicity is bad news for responders. FD and PD work closely on these calls and provide assistance in a variety of ways. “Once they get their intelligence and


get ready to do a possible fentanyl raid, then they rely on us to tell them the proper PPE for the atmosphere. They also rely on us once they get a sample to make a detection of what we are dealing with, whether it is an imminent threat etc. The FBI relies on us on white powder calls to determine whether it is baking soda or something worse, and we determine the threat and whether it needs to be escalated. The police rely on us for PPE, detection and decon; so for the last fentanyl lab we were half a block away setting up decon and water supplies. As soon as they came out we were able to provide them with immediate tech decon, and for the civilians that were operating the lab. They realise that they can’t do it all, and


CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018 www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018 32 CBRNe WORLD February 2018 www.cbrneworld.com


CBRNeWORLD


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