By Selwyn Crawford
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS — As they prepared last week for a training session, members of the Dallas bomb squad took a “live” call. Someone had discovered a decades-old first-aid kit that contained picric acid.
Though it had beneficial military and medicinal uses around World Wars I and II, the chemical becomes highly explosive when it gets old and crystallizes. A Pennsylvania teenager blew off his hand in 2003 when he mixed picric acid with other materials in what authorities said then was a bomb-making attempt.
“We went and got the chemical, took it out to our range and destroyed it,” Dallas bomb squad Sgt. Dennis Wilson said. “That’s what we do.”
Exactly. When things blow up — or are about to — the bomb squad gets the call.
But in Dallas, it was the unit itself that nearly exploded.
Six years ago, the Dallas bomb squad was in turmoil. It was led by a longtime supervisor who had allowed her federal bomb technician certificate to expire, and squad members complained about a lack of necessary training that they and others said put them in danger.
An internal report from the Dallas Police Department, where the unit was headquartered, recommended several changes - the biggest calling for shifting control of the unit from police to Dallas Fire-Rescue. That recommendation became reality in 2009, and changes are still being made.
“We’re still in transition,” said Dallas Fire-Rescue Assistant Chief Eugene Campbell Jr., head of the department’s Homeland Security Bureau. “Are we perfect yet? I don’t know. But we’re getting better at it every day.”
The former longtime supervisor left the police department shortly after she was demoted in 2005. Wilson, her replacement, not only has his proper federal certification, but he also sits on the prestigious 12-member National Association of Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board.
He plays down the move to the fire department, saying the job remains the same: to protect the public. But he notes that the unit does some things differently in preparing to handle its high-risk tasks.
“There’s probably more structure, more training and more equipment now,” Wilson said. “I think it’s made us better because we’re able to respond with confidence, working together as a team, and we’re working better with other agencies.”
Among the biggest complaints about the former bomb squad regime was that members rarely met industry training guidelines of 16 hours a month, and that they weren’t proficient on the equipment they had. There was also concern that the squad, with only two certified technicians, was dangerously understaffed.
“We train quite a bit now,” Wilson said. “There is an industry standard on the number of hours we have to train, and we meet and usually exceed that.”
On Wednesday, Wilson’s unit spent two hours in the heat near Fair Park practicing with a robot that can destroy a bomb — or a human — by remote control.
“I just thought the guys needed some more training on this piece of equipment, so they could become more familiar with it,” Wilson said to intermittent shouts of “Fire in the hole!”
Finding time to train has been difficult during the past few months. The Dallas squad, like every other bomb squad in North Texas, was heavily involved in securing venues connected to the 2010 NBA All-Star Game and Super Bowl XLV in February. And the Dallas team was front and center in the security preparations for the Dallas Mavericks’ victory parade last month.
In 2010, the unit responded to 49 service calls. With almost 30 calls already this year, the unit is on pace to surpass last year’s total.
The bomb squad rapidly responds to high-profile incidents, but Wilson said it also makes more mundane runs ranging from “protective sweeps, to found suspicious devices, to found military ordnance.”
The Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit, the bomb squad’s official name, has five members, two more than in 2005. All five are properly certified, and the team has more than 30 years of certified bomb tech experience.
Two other people have done the prep work to become certified once they attend the nation’s lone bomb technician school in Huntsville, Ala.
Campbell said Dallas fire officials initially wanted to grow the squad to between eight and 12 members eventually but, “with the down economy … we’ve slowed that down a little bit.”
Other North Texas cities have larger bomb squads. Plano has eight part-time technicians who are on call as needed.
“But they don’t respond just in Plano,” police spokesman Rick McDonald said. “They go all over Collin County.”
In Arlington, the bomb unit has six technicians and six canines. And in Fort Worth, where the bomb squad has long been under the fire department’s direction and where Dallas Fire Chief Eddie Burns once worked as a certified bomb technician, the team has 13 budgeted positions.
Wilson said that he doesn’t believe Dallas needs a much larger unit to be completely effective. He said in a perfect world, his squad would consist of between six and eight people. A smaller team, he said, can be a sharper team.
“You want them to get in a lot of work with the equipment,” Wilson said. “You want them to be able to respond to a lot of calls and with a big squad, I’m not sure how many calls they’re actually on.”
The face of the squad will gradually change. When the fire department took it over in 2009, squad members who were police officers were allowed to remain for as long as they wanted. They are all still there, including Wilson.
“We still have four members of the bomb squad who are police officers,” Campbell said. “But they’ll be the last. As they retire, resign or get promoted into other areas, we’ll transition in with fire department employees.”
The lone fire department member of the squad is Section Chief Chris Martinez, who became a certified bomb tech earlier this year and is being groomed to take over when Wilson leaves.
He said the unit’s changeover from the police department has been a good one for Dallas Fire-Rescue.
“It’s something that’s completely new, that we’ve never done before,” Martinez said. “The fire department is steeped in so much tradition …but this gives us a lot more options in the future.”
Copyright 2011 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS