Detective Mark Seibel, Hazmat Team Leader, Los Angeles County Sheriff s Department, tells Gwyn Winfield about putting the lab in LA CBRNeWORLD Quantity has a quality all of its own was one of Stalin s better epithets, and it s hard not to feel the same when you see the level of equipment possessed by the LA County Sheriff s Department. For a CBRN aficionado, there s a feeling last possessed at Christmas, aged seven: there just seems so much and it s all SO exciting! That said, the Hazmat team is a small, tight unit of five members three sworn officers, two chemists (of which more later) plus a dog (of which even more later). While numerically the unit is not huge, it is equipped to a level some militaries might struggle to match, with a state-of-the-art Hazmat vehicle, two CBRN recce gators, one mobile labs, a variety of sensors (largely manufactured by Bruker) and, because they are colocated with SWAT and EOD, a variety of other bits of materiel those teams are familiar with (Nabco containment units, for example). LA is a UASI (Urban Areas Secure Initiative) Tier One city, and even amongst that rarefied crowd it is at the top, slugging it out with New York for primacy. While the psychological focus might drift to the glitzier LAPD, there is a far greater area that needs to be patrolled by the County Sheriff s Department. Detective Mark Seibel is the Hazmat Team Leader, and it is the Hazmat Detail, but this is really a misnomer they are a CBRNe unit first and foremost and traditional Hazmat is left to the Fire Department (See the interview pp62). Det. Seibel explained where the lines between County Sheriff, LAPD and County Fire lie: The jurisdictions are clearly defined. The County of LA has 88 cities and a large amount of unincorporated areas where there are towns but no city no mayor or city council etc. The Sheriff s Department provides law enforcement to about half of those cities and all of the unincorporated areas, so that is our clear jurisdiction. The only law enforcement Hazmat team, beside the FBI, is LAPD. Their jurisdiction is the city of LA, which is the largest of the 88 cities, and they stay with LA City. We provide law enforcement Hazmat and CBRN to the other 43 police departments and could go into the City if LA requested mutual aid, which they do about once a year, and we could call LA for our aid. The City of LA has four LA City Fire Hazmat Task Forces, the County Fire Department has four Hazmat Task Forces, and six of the other 37 Fire Departments have their own Hazmat Task Forces. We work mainly with the LA County FD, but we also work with LA City Fire because of the contract we have to secure the transit system the subways and buses, most of which are in the City of LA. The Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Taste the rainbow! LA County Sherriff provides many shades of capability LA Co. Sherriff www.cbrneworld.com April 2013 CBRNe WORLD 31
Support Teams (CST) are local responder backup, if we have a problem that s too big to handle we call the CST, we ve enjoyed the relationship since 1999. It s very rare they re needed on an incident but they help us with special events all the time, and we keep a good relationship with them via things like the preventative rad/nuke stuff, but with 16 Hazmat teams in town it s rare that we need them. It s not just the land that the County Sheriff have to be prepared to deal with LA is alive to the fact that the threat might come by sea. The littoral (the near-to-coast offshore area) is an important front for LA responders: Mumbai-style swarm attacks are a possibility and there are also Mexican drug cartels running boats filled with narcotics and who knows what else into the region. While a great deal of the littoral and blue water role is left to the US Coast Guard, who have their Pacific Strike Team for hazardous material incidents, there is more than enough traffic to pose a potential threat. The Hazmat Detail has only had to respond to an incident at sea once, regarding a radiation alarm, but they have done a significant amount of training to prepare for such an incident. The team is a tight one, with most of the members having more than six years experience in the post. This, coupled with the grant money, means they are highly specialised with a wide variety of training and skills under their belt. My team is designed to prevent or respond to a CBRN incidents but this specialised training and equipment frequently gets used for other things which you ll see at the Dublin conference. We re used a lot for brush fires and Hazmat recon; we travel a lot lighter than a Hazmat 18-wheeler, so we can go places they can t and we have unique CBRN equipment that others do not have. Since we do not respond to traditional hazmat incidents such as a chlorine tank leaking, we do not have to carry that type of specialised Hazmat equipment, so we get to have a lot more CBRN-related equipment. We ve been used quite a bit when there s a problem that no-one else can deal with. We do preventative missions afloat the Coastguard has the Pacific Strike Team operating out of the Bay area and traditional Hazmat incidents that occur at sea would be their jurisdiction first; we don t deal with traditional Hazmat spills. While Hazmat is not a County Sheriff role, neither are meth labs but often, meths and other homemade drugs pose a significant respiratory and contact health hazard and FD Hazmat teams in other cities are often on I really don t think this is our stop LA County Sherriff has a contract to deal with incidents on the transport infrastructure LA. Co. Sherriff 32 CBRNe WORLD April 2013 www.cbrneworld.com
standby to assist. It would seem to follow, then, that police Hazmat would do a narcotics Hazmat role. Not so. In California, that role is taken by the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement Taskforce, and Det Seibel states, those trains do not meet we have met them once in 12 years. Instead, the team is kept busy on their own preventative missions and about four calls a month, half of which are traditional white powder incidents often done in conjunction with County Fire. Det Seibel recounted a typical call: We had a man on camera who looked like he was intentionally spilling mercury on a subway platform before Christmas. When all was said and done it was an accidental spill but for a couple of days people thought it was an attack not a good attack but an attack nonetheless. At the time of that occurrence, we didn t have the capability on a handheld instrument to identify mercury, but training and experience told us that it behaved and appeared like mercury. We had a heck of a time collecting it as evidence as it was so heavy, so we added some bits to our evidence kits after that. By the time we had finished making our entry, the mercury had sat there all night and worked its way up to the mezzanine level of the subway platform. We had no way of knowing that it had made it that far, so we got an elemental detector to make sure that we now have that capability. For a team that has so much kit, there is a refreshing amount of cynicism towards the various detectors the only identification that Mark Seibel puts any faith in comes out of his mobile lab. The mobile lab currently, as he admits, is not ideal, for reasons relating to the vehicle it is housed in rather than the lab itself. The benchtops inside are not optimised for travel, which means that any detector fixed to the bench would undergo a degree of shake and rattle and thus require a period of recalibration when the team gets to the site. Instead, with the exception of the GCMS, all the detectors are left in their Peli cases and set up when they get to the scene (with presumably less of a need for Thanks to their mobile lab the Sherriff s department is able to provide expert advice LA. Co. Sherriff recalibration). This is all due to change in a matter of weeks, when the LA County Sheriff Police Hazmat Detail takes charge of their brand new, builtfor-purpose, Pierce mobile lab. We have a lot of stuff in there to detect chemical product. We have the Razor PCR for bio, [and the new lab] is not going to be much different from what we have now, we are not getting different equipment with the new truck. The advantage will be having all those detectors and their libraries up and running, mounted, on a regular basis, which will speed up their ability to identify things. Right now it is a big pain in their butts to get all that stuff up and running and set up; this will give us a large operational capability that we don t have now but not necessarily a better identification one. LA County Sheriff s dedication to the mobile lab has made them popular amongst their local partners and has meant that there is less of a requirement to work with the CST (whose lab is usually the first thing that responders want from them). Yet the lab is not the only detector the team put their faith in. They are also the proud owners of a CBRN K9 Unit. There have been a variety of companies that work in this area Wagtail in the UK for example but the only one that has made a significant investment is Signature Science. Det Seibel was unable to confirm where his dog got trained but stated that it was now an essential part of the team mix. When you do a preventative mission, in special events or wherever, you realise that you lack the ability to prevent a CB attack because you haven t found the dispersal device you can t see it. When we heard about the programme, we looked into it, verified the contractor that was in charge of the programme that they were a lab that was well suited to teach a dog to pick up these scents and verified that the dog would not be injured by the scents, which are precursors or degradation materials. We 34 CBRNe WORLD April 2013 www.cbrneworld.com
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All aboard! The team has also trained to deal with CBR incidents afloat LA. Co. Sherriff are happy with the threat scents they are using we would like more but science is what it is and we are very anxious to add that to our preventative search capability. We ve been happy since then that we have filled that capability gap. Often K9 Units are like team members and when one of them retires it becomes difficult to replace them, but Det Seibel felt confident that when Johnny Ringo had sniffed his last, they will bring another dog in to fill the gap. Like a traditional EOD K9, the dog gets two weeks of handler training and then another six of specialist CBRN training. Much like any other CBRN mission, the K9 Unit requires two staff: one handling the dog, one watching, and both are Hazmat trained so that they can take advantage of whatever the dog points at. Not everyone is as entranced with K9 units, EOD or CBRN, as Det Seibel, as some research suggests what the dogs detect is not so much the explosive as the components and that a lot of the tests rely on nonvisual/obvious clues from the handler. That said, dogs have a role to play in prevention, consistently scoring highly during red teamed events because of the anxiety they cause in the subject who, uncertain as to whether or not the dog has detected him, starts to give visual signals that can alert responders. As such, there is a major deterrent factor to having a CBRN K9 Unit if it persuades those who might want to place a device that it can be detected before it disseminates, then the chances are that they will either not place it or have to spend more time creating a more sophisticated device. With the handheld detectors, mobile Gator units fitted with Hawk/Rapid stand-off detectors and RAID XPs, the new lab, K9 Unit and self-decontamination (Intelagard Macaw backpacks) it is difficult to see what extra kit the team needs. Det Seibel agrees that he doesn t have a long wishlist. Thanks to the lab capability it is a mature response, but that doesn t stop the grant money rolling in. LA recently won the Securing the Cities (STC) Initiative 36 CBRNe WORLD April 2013 www.cbrneworld.com
from the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which will see a first year grant of $1.5 million for radiation detectors and training going to the Los Angeles Operational Area. [STC] is a big deal, it will bring a lot of money and equipment to the area. Previously all the agencies did it on their own but this will now force them to combine their capability. Since 2005, we ve been on the forefront of doing preventative work, we have an aerial and afloat radiation detection capability, and shortly it will also be permanently mounted on the trucks. Compared to other agencies we will request the least amount of stuff: we have had 400 dosimeters on patrol since 2005 and we have been very progressive, we have been on all the DNDO working groups since 2005. For a small unit we are deep in bed with them and they rely on us for operational things such as testing equipment. We benefit from that relationship as well. Timing is everything and as the financial freeze sets in, LA County Sheriff find themselves sitting at the high water mark the big ticket items, like the lab, are already bought and paid for and the team is too small to be cut down in size. That s not to say they can escape the financial cuts entirely however: they have already been asked to trim the training budget. The speciality team hadn t been hit hard before last week but then we were notified of a $23 million department cut between now and the end of the Fiscal Year, which is the end of June. All of our training has been cut unless it is required certified training, even if DHS or another grant is paying, as the philosophy is that if I can go away for a week of training then I could work patrol for a week. Everyone on the team, however, has been here for over six years. There s a minimum of 800 hours training to be on the team and we could go without training for two years without noticing it much. It s difficult to be negative about the County Sheriff s Department. It is small, well trained and the team have a clear understanding of the difference between detection and identification. It is also well integrated within the whole LA force structure Det Seibel, Chief Martin and Dr Fleak were keen to impress the level of join-up of the operation, which is indeed evident. While they might not be as seamless as some of the smaller cities (there is just too much kit to believe there is no friction in the overlaps) they do lack the open hostility found in many large cities such as New York or New Orleans which is nothing short of miraculous. Most importantly, there is a lot of specialist training that goes on within the team. This, rather than any equipment, along with the fact that they all have over six years in post, is the real strength of the unit.