Published: November 07, 2009 02:25 am      

CITY OF TONAWANDA: Vigilant Guard exercise called a success

CITY OF TONAWANDA — When Brian and Gary Metzger, owners of Metzger Removal Inc., signed on to build the piles of rubble that would later house the Vigilant Guard exercise at the former Spaulding Fibre site, they did so with little time to spare.

Lt. Col. Matthew Cooper, WMD Branch Chief for the New York Division of Military and Naval Affairs, said Erie County was chosen to host the massive training operation in early June, but finding the right real estate to hold it was another matter.

“With the number of trucks and vehicles involved, there’s not a lot of places that are able to house and support that,” Cooper said.

That’s why the Spaulding Fibre location was selected — ample parking and plenty of space. But once the details were worked out, there were only 18 days from the time the Hinds Street fence was cut down until the start of operations. Cooper said the fact that the North Tonawanda company got the buildings up was nothing short of a miracle. The high quality of those structures for trainees was something else all together.

The Metzgers planned the buildings from the ground up, using their knowledge of concrete demolition to replicate a collapsed building from the ground up. City of Tonawanda Fire Capt. Tom Wolfe, who helped oversee the construction of the piles, said everything, from the dummies and cars lodged inside to the concrete rubble, itself, was done to exacting standards.

“They strategically placed almost every piece of rubble on that pile,” Wolfe said.

Corridors, rooms and even elevator shafts were constructed to replicate every aspect of a collapsed hospital, but building the pile was only the beginning. Workers constructed two roads on the site from scratch at 9 p.m. on Sunday — 10 hours before the operation would start. Then, each day, rescuers would come in to clear the structure, extract vehicles and remove dummies, and for a few hours each night, under bright spotlights, the Metzgers’ crew would have to reset everything for the next round.

Brian Rousseau, deputy chief of special operations for New York State Fire, said their dedication showed. Rescue teams who would work for days on end without thinking in a real-life emergency were begging for mercy during training, Rousseau said with a laugh.

“Some teams had two days on the pile, and after one and a half, they were crying ‘uncle,’ ” Rousseau said.

The company also helped out in other ways, from grading land at Fireman’s Park for helicopter landings to allowing the trainees to use their own River Road rubble pile to train canine units. Rousseau said most training operations are difficult to use in training dogs, since so much grinding and shoring is going on. Since the Metzgers allowed groups to use their site, the training that canine units received was much more extensive than what could have been accomplished at the main site.

“It’s not something they had to do,” Cooper said. “It’s something they wanted to do.”

Cooper said the generals on the ground evaluating the exercise have already called it the “gold standard” for future operations, and he gives a lot of the credit for that to the Metzgers. More than 3,000 people trained during the operation, and more than 800 others came to observe the action. Cooper said observers from states that would likely never field such a large training exercise gained invaluable experience from just watching the process.

“New York is a big state, and everything they do is on a larger scale, for obvious reasons,” Cooper said. “As much as we did well, you still learn, and some of these lessons can’t be learned without an exercise of this magnitude.”

Evaluators from plenty of other agencies, including Northern Command, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration were also on hand to take notes on the process. Rousseau was part of the first urban rescue team that went into the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and said his team made unbelievable leaps ahead in the short time they were in Tonawanda.

“What we’ve done in four days has advanced our program four years, and that’s conservative,” Rousseau said.

Responders and observers from countries including Italy, Denmark, South Africa, Poland, Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom are taking the knowledge they gained back home. Rousseau said a European Union exercise planned for 30 countries next year will likely draw heavily from what was learned locally, and people who recently returned from the international response to the Indonesian earthquake disaster at the end of September.

“Every Vigilant Guard exercise after this is going to be measured by what we did here in New York,” Cooper said.

For the Metzger brothers, it has been an honor to be a part of such an endeavor. And as they take down the concrete structure and bring the material back to their own stockpiles for further use, Brian said he completely agrees with something he heard Mayor Ron Pilozzi say.

“If all this saves one life, it was worth it,” he said.

Contact reporter Daniel Pye at 693-1000, ext. 158.