Perry Guardian Center Subway arrives for underground simulations

Photos & story submitted by Avery Chenoweth, Perry

An incredible event took place under floodlights and a line of truck headlights

last Friday evening when a 40-ton, 75-foot long, plastic-cocooned subway rail

car was hoisted by a giant crane and lifted over an opening in the roof of a

mock subway tunnel at the nearly completed Guardian Center’s 830-acre campus in

Perry and gently lowered onto one of the two 1,600-foot rail tracks.

The giant vehicle-mounted telescoping crane was provided by Southway Crane

& Rigging of Byron, Georgia, and can lift 250 tons; others in its fleet are

capable of lifting up to 800 tons.

The mock subway system is only one of Guardian’s unique training concepts. It

is enclosed in a 1,600 foot-long narrow shed simulating an underground subway

system with a station, double tracks, and eight surplus former Washington DC

Metro System cars that were purchased and can be configured for a number of

emergencies encountered on trains, such as derailments, electrical failures,

poison gas attacks, and explosions.  A large hole will be blown out of the

top on one car in order to recreate the Madrid subway terrorist attack of some

years ago.

Assisting “hands-on” with the ten-man rigging crew securing the crane lines for

lifting the massive steel subway car off the 40-wheel, 100-foot long

tractor-trailer that carted it from Washington DC were the Guardian Center’s

founder and Chief Executive Officer, Geoff Burkart, Vice President of

Operations, Timothy Maloney, and Vann Burkart, VP Business.

Entrepreneur Burkart had been Director of Bell South’s Aviation Department that

participated in three months of relief efforts at New Orleans after Hurricane

Katrina.

Having witnessed there the the challenges associated with overall disaster

coordination of all emergency agencies, the idea came to Burkart to create a

series of non-governmental, privately funded first responder disaster relief

training centers nationwide to rectify that. This first Center in Perry is

nearing completion. Expectations are that in the near future upwards of 7,000

police, firefighter, emergency medical, FEMA, military, Homeland Security, and

Red Cross trainees will receive training here monthly.

Ultra-Realistic Training

To recreate what emergency first responders now face unprepared, Burkart’s

vision has created a 75-acre functioning “Mock City”—which resembles a complete

disaster area or even a war zone. Dozens of multi-story concrete buildings are

in various stages of destruction: collapsed parking garages, roof collapses,

toppled buildings, and even a cluster of small completely furnished houses is

set in a depressed area that can be flooded with up to eight feet of water.

Scattered in and around these semi-destroyed structures are piles of junk,

crushed automobiles, broken concrete slabs and chunks, huge rocks, protruding

concrete reinforcing rods, collapsed walls and doorways, piles of broken

furniture, twisted steel beams—all replicating what first responders found

after Katrina and recently Hurricane Sandy that wreaked havoc up and down the

Northeast coast.

One helicopter landing pad and multiple LZs (Landing Zones) afford air lift and

evacuation training, as well as a simulated battlefield nearby.

All of these mock structures are rigged so that collapsed floors, ceilings, and

the flooding can be reversed and re-triggered for the succeeding groups of

trainees.

Some of the areas can be ignited in controlled fires or filled with smoke, and

dummy casualties are deliberately hidden under blocked hallways, doors, debris,

concrete slabs, blocked highway and roadways, and other impediments

characteristic of a disaster area to simulate human rescue training.

One hundred and two thousand square feet of office space has been configured

for Emergency Operations Center exercises in overall monitoring and controlling

disaster situations by state governors, federal agencies, the military, and

other emergency field directors.

CEO founder Burkart is confident that this new scope of training will fill a

much-needed gap in coordinating first responder training nationwide and

eventually world-wide. Two more Guardian Centers are planned for the future in

other parts of the country.

The first real test will come December 3rd when the first contracted group, a

40-man U.S. Marine CBIRF (Chemical, Biological, Incident Response Team) from

the Washington DC area, will attend a three-day session.

Photos & story by Avery

Chenoweth, Perry

HHJ News