"Practice pays off during emergency at Mojave Airport"

["Stephen Irwin" <stepheni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Practice pays off during emergency at Mojave Airport
By ALLISON GATLIN 
The Antelope Valley (CA) Press


MOJAVE - Everything worked the way it was supposed to when airport and other
agencies responded June 3 to an explosion in an explosive materials storage
area at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

That's not to say that other things can't be done to respond even better or
prevent such an occurrence in the future, said Bob Rice, airfield operations
director.

Rice reported about the incident and lessons learned from the response to
the East Kern Airport District board of directors Tuesday. The district
governs the airfield. 

The emergency training exercises airport personnel conduct with other
agencies - such as a simulated B-2 bomber crash scenario Tuesday - have paid
off, said the board's General Manager Stu Witt. An earlier exercise involved
a scenario almost identical to the June 3 explosion.

The incident began shortly before noon when a fueler on the airfield noticed
smoke coming from, across the runway and behind the aircraft storage area,
in the direction of the portion of the airfield used to store explosive
materials.

The control tower was notified and asked to train a video surveillance
camera on the area. On the video feed, it soon became clear there was a fire
and 911 was notified, as was Rice.

"I knew in the first 10 seconds it was a serious incident," he said.

A system designed to recall key personnel was activated, successfully
reaching those required and bringing them all in on the Sunday afternoon
within an hour, Rice said.

Other local agencies, including Kern County Fire and Sheriff's departments,
Kern County bomb squad and Edwards Air Force Base, joined the effort, as
well as did representatives from the FBI and the Department of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms. 

By 6 p.m., officials determined the best course of action was to let the
fire burn itself out. As the investigation began the following day,
officials discovered a debris field spreading some 2,000 feet.

The unit itself, a trailer-like structure, was rated to hold 40,000 pounds
of explosives. Alpha Explosives, the company that owned it, never stored
more than 10,000 pounds, and at the time of the explosion it held only
1,500, Rice said. Large pieces of the storage unit - measuring several feet
in length - were found as far as 2,300 feet away, having cleared airliners.
At the storage site itself, all that remained of the unit was a blackened
crater two feet deep. An adjacent unit eight feet away was pushed into a
third unit and its roof was blown off, Rice said.

Flames from the initial explosion destroyed a truck and a 767 airliner in a
salvage yard directly in front of the storage unit. Sand was crystallized by
the heat. The cause of the explosion still is under investigation. The
explosive storage was approved by the FBI and ATF and met all requirements.

To lessen the danger of a similar incident in the future, explosives of that
strength - called mass detonation explosives - will be stored in earthen
bunkers on the airport property, left over from the facility's history as a
Marine Corps air base.

Had the materials been stored in one of those bunkers, no one even would
have known about such an explosion until they arrived Monday morning to open
the doors, Rice said.

Other tenants lease the bunkers on a month-by-month basis. Airport staff is
informing them of plans to terminate the leases in order to use the bunkers'
for explosive storage.

Planned upgrades to the airport's security system will provide better video
camera coverage to detect and record any future incidents of this type, as
well.

East Kern Airport Director Dick Rutan praised the response of district
personnel to the emergency.

"I felt the situation was well in hand as far as what the airport did," he
said. "It speaks well to their training and to you, Bob."

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