By Ian McCann
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS — By this fall, Texas is poised to have a second team of emergency responders ready to answer FEMA’s call to handle major disasters.
Texas Task Force 2 has been in development since 2004 and has already been called into action by the state more than a half-dozen times. Officials leading the task force expect that by August it will meet federal standards for urban search and rescue.
The team of 210 firefighters, split into three units, would be ready to respond to hurricanes, tornadoes, major floods, terrorist attacks or other widespread disasters. It would become the 29th task force in the country in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s urban search and rescue system.
Former Dallas Fire Chief Steve Abraira was the driving force to form a task force to serve North Texas. With support from the North Central Texas Council of Governments, Task Force 2 has won nearly $7.3 million in state and federal grants to pay for training and equipment since 2004.
“The initial proposal was to build up a capability in the 16-county region” of the council, said Dallas Fire-Rescue Capt. John Ostroski, the task force’s program manager.
Since then, the mission expanded, with the goal to address needs beyond the North Texas region. Nearly a dozen other agencies have joined with Dallas. They include the Richardson, Garland and Farmers Branch fire departments, as well as the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Department of Public Safety.
Most of the funding has come from the grants, Ostroski said. And most has gone to training, which costs approximately $25,000 per task force member. The members are cross-trained in several areas, including building collapse searches, hazardous materials response and confined space and trench rescues.
As the task force has grown, leaders have followed FEMA guidelines for training and equipping the teams, making the transition to meet federal standards seamless.
Texas Task Force 1, formed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, is based in College Station and has responded to numerous events, including the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and several hurricanes.
Even if emergencies don’t rise to the level of a FEMA response, the abilities of the North Texas task force can be put to use. Dallas, for example, uses the equipment and team members for some traffic accidents and other rescues.
One of the key roles for an urban search and rescue team, especially in an environment like the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is to search for people in collapsed buildings after a disaster. Task force members have gotten hands-on training over the past year, using the Reunion Arena demolition and Texas Stadium implosion.
The Texas Stadium training, which the task force did with the Irving Fire Department, was an especially good opportunity, Ostroski said.
“It resembled an actual disaster of epic proportions, something we’d actually see,” he said. “There was a lot of rebar, old concrete and voids.”
Richardson Battalion Chief Ron Kutz said that the eight firefighters from his department involved in the task force are gaining experience they otherwise wouldn’t have. And they are better prepared for routine rescue work within their city.
“We gain training we really can’t get anywhere else,” he said. “It makes us in a better state of readiness.”
Copyright 2011 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS