By Calvin Biesecker
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its state and local partners this week completed a two-week full-scale exercise to demonstrate the Southeast region’s capability in coordinating, communicating and responding to a possible radiological or nuclear threat along the region’s interstate highways.
The exercise marked the end of the three-year old Southeast Transportation Corridor Pilot (SETCP), which was mandated by Congress, and involved the deployment of stationary and mobile radiation detection systems and related training, alarm adjudication and communication. Nine states plus the District of Columbia and the Port of Charleston participated in the SETCP.
“We will review the valuable lessons learned from working with state and local law enforcement that can be used to extend radiological and nuclear detection capabilities to other areas of the United States,” Vayl Oxford, director of the DHS Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, said in a statement yesterday.
DNDO will continue to work with the participating states, and others, in providing reach back support, training, and lessons learned from the pilot, but won’t be buying additional equipment, an agency spokesman told Defense Daily. DNDO provides analysts at its Joint Analysis Center to the states to help them adjudicate alarms at various detection nodes, which are typically located at commercial vehicle inspection areas like truck weigh stations.
The SETCP, combined with the ongoing Securing the Cities initiative that has brought similar capabilities to the New York metropolitan area, had driven interests by other states for deploying fixed and mobile radiological and nuclear detection equipment, the spokesman said. DNDO has come up with “playbooks” to help states understand the types of equipment available to them, concepts of operation, training, technical reach back, communication and lessons learned, he said.
In the past few years California and New Jersey and some localities have acquired radiological detection equipment on their own.
In the recent SETCP exercise there were four threat streams of intelligence used, generally indicating potential attacks on military bases or critical infrastructure. Vehicles carrying surrogate source materials to represent radiological threats were then sent out on the highways of the participating states to test how well the operators of the detection equipment performed, whether they followed appropriate protocols, and how well communications and coordination worked. Other than the heightened alert mode driven by the intelligence as part of the exercise, the operators were not notified that a source material would be coming through a particular inspection point, the spokesman said.