Preface to the First Edition (2012)

This book is about protecting large, high visibility events and public gatherings from accidents or incidents involving hazardous substances. By this, I mean chemical weapons, biological weapons, radioactive substances, nuclear devices, and the whole spectrum of toxic, flammable, and otherwise dangerous commercial and industrial hazardous materials. Collectively, this is the CBRN/HAZMAT threat.

WHO NEEDS TO READ THIS BOOK?

This book is really designed for anyone involved in preparation of safety and security plans for large events. I am writing this book for two groups of readers. First, I am writing this book for the many people who plan, manage, and provide emergency services support to major events. Few of these people will be subject matter experts in CBRN/HAZMAT but need to know about how to correctly consider the CBRN/HAZMAT threat in their plans. The second part of the readership is the CBRN/HAZMAT practitioner who may be tasked to support a major event. Many practitioners have great expertise in response, but supporting a major event can be quite different than normal operations. It will be difficult to address both categories of reader equally and consistently throughout the book. Wherever possible, if I think something is very useful one or the other, I will highlight it.

As the reader will soon see, this book cuts across many different disciplines. Because I try to connect some ideas and practices from many different sources, I hope that this is useful to the security, safety, or emergency planning generalist as well as specialists.

WHY?

I am writing this book because I have spent 12 years working on security and safety arrangements for major public events, both in specific CBRN/HAZMAT roles and in less specialized antiterrorism roles. I have wanted to write something like this since January 2005. I was sitting in an assistant fire chief's car in downtown Washington DC as part of a "joint hazard assessment team" for the second inauguration of President George W. Bush. I was sitting with a command officer from the DC Fire Department, an agent from the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, a sergeant from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, and a military officer from one of the multitude of US military units supporting the event. I was sitting in the car in a capacity as CBRN specialist from the US Secret Service. If we had more room in the car, we could have added at least a dozen others with a valid need to be there.

Because we had the whole day to sit in the car, we talked about many things. However, as we all were CBRN/HAZMAT specialists to one degree or another, we engaged in rather a lot of "shop talk" and airing of grievances, as one does in such a circumstance. I realized that a lot of people cared about doing the right thing, but no one person or department had the whole answer on how to prepare for a large event. This particular day in 2005 was certainly not my first or my last major event. However, certain thoughts started to crystallize in my head. The discussions with my comrades from other agencies and backgrounds reinforced what I already suspected. I realized several important points, which I should describe.

Major Events Take a Lot of Planning and Involve a Lot of Agencies

Any major security and safety planning effort will involve many people and many agencies. This means that there will be many different agendas, varying levels of knowledge and experience, and different philosophical approaches. Because CBRN/HAZMAT incidents do not happen at every event, sometimes the planning for them is lost in the bureaucratic noise or is not given the emphasis that it should rightly have. More often than not, this is not because of deliberate decisions but because of the bureaucratic nature of the process.

The Wheel Gets Reinvented Every Single Time

The planning and execution of major events is complicated. Major events do not occur every day or even every year in some places. Conditions change. Organizations have personnel turnover and attrition. Even over the course of a six month planning effort, the individuals who are assigned to turn up to planning meetings are likely to change. This results in planning efforts that repeat themselves year after year, often without much effort made to capture lessons learned. Some departments and agencies are better than others, but after about ten years, it really did feel that I was starting from scratch each time. It seemed to me that even a minimal effort to capture and write down some "best practices" would help manage the next event.

The Workers and the Bosses Have Different Perspectives

There are dedicated and knowledgeable people in CBRN/HAZMAT. There are certainly many more people working in the field now than when I started out in the early 1990s. However, if you go far enough up the chain of command, everyone has a boss somewhere who is not a CBRN/HAZMAT specialist and has a variety of concerns broader than the CBRN/HAZMAT niche. And these are the people likely to be making the big decisions about planning and response at the large events. In 20 years in the CBRN/HAZMAT business, I spent a lot of time working for a boss who was not a specialist in the field, but I also worked in various capacities under bosses who were specialists as well. But once I left the US Army Chemical School, I never once had a second level supervisor, a boss's boss, who was a CBRN specialist. This was certainly the case with just about everyone I worked with. And I suspect that this situation is prevalent around the world.

People from Different Occupational Backgrounds Will Work on the Problem in Different Ways

Firefighters, paramedics, police officers, environmental specialists, public health specialists, physicians, soldiers, and scientists (to name only a few) will all look at the problem of CBRN/HAZMAT in different ways. This is because their training and experience are different in important ways. All of these perspectives have valid things to say about how to make the public safe and secure, but none of them have a monopoly on the truth. I have literally seen fights break out between police officers and firefighters. The efforts involved in CBRN/HAZMAT planning and response for a major event tend to be somewhat outside the parameters of everyone's normal day-to-day roles.

There is no Default Script to Fall Back on

In 2004, Ronald Reagan died. The State Funeral for President Reagan required a planning effort that was crushed into a few days rather than the months or years normally allotted for planning for major events in Washington DC. The US Army, at the Military District of Washington, had a standing default plan for state funerals. However, we did not have much to work with in the CBRN/HAZMAT arena except for our common sense and experience. If ever there were a day we could have used a "CBRN at Special Events" for dummies manual, 11 June 2004 was that day. I thought then and continue to believe now that there is a requirement for a good planning basis that can be picked up and used in a hurry.

All of these realizations mean that I feel that there is ample scope for someone to try to cut through all of these problems and put a useful common body of knowledge onto paper.

WHY AM I QUALIFIED TO WRITE THIS BOOK?

First, by definition I am more qualified than anyone else who has written a book on this subject, because nobody else has a book in print on this specific subject. However, that's just a technicality. I have been working for 20 years in the field of CBRN defense and HAZMAT response. My career has taken me on a grand tour through the whole sphere of CBRN/HAZMAT, while also giving me experience in other related sectors such as emergency medicine, military operations, law enforcement, and emergency planning. As we have already discussed, planning for major events sits at the nexus of several different important operational disciplines, and I feel particularly privileged to have worked precisely in that nexus. I was originally trained as a Chemical Corps officer in the US Army, but my career path forced me to receive training and experience in many other disciplines, including protective security, emergency management, intelligence, radiation safety and health physics, incident command, explosives/demolition, fire safety, hazardous materials, and physical security.

In particular, I had three different assignments in government service that put me squarely in the line of fire for multidisciplinary CBRN/HAZMAT planning and response:

• Disaster Preparedness Advisor, White House Military Office 1996-2002-I was the CBRN subject matter expert in the Defense Department office at the White House that does emergency planning for the office of the President.
• CBRN Specialist, Technical Security Division, US Secret Service 2002-2008-I served in CBRN countermeasures in direct support of the White House and the US President, in a wide variety of assignments.
• Operations Officer, 32nd Civil Support Team, Maryland National Guard. 1998-2003. As with most National Guard jobs, this was a part time job. I worked to establish a state-level emergency response team for CBRN incidents in Maryland.

Because Washington DC and the White House are central to a disproportionately large portion of political major events in the United States and because the US Secret...