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CNN Live Saturday

Baltimore Conducts Toxic Attack Drill

Aired July 13, 2002 - 18:08   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: It is a case of life imitating art. Sort of. In the movie "Sum of all Fears" Baltimore comes under a terror attack. Well, now the city is conducting response drills and, as Kathleen Koch reports, after September 11, officials there said that they needed to start practicing, just in case.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JACK RYAN, MOVIE CHARACTER: The bomb is in play!

KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): "The Sum of All Fears," Hollywood's vision of a terror attack on Baltimore.

Baltimore's vision premiered Saturday, just as carefully orchestrated.

Hundreds of volunteers, elaborate makeup, all to practice readiness for a possible toxic chemical attack.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My ears are ringing, I can't hear too well...

KOCH: The drill of a magnitude University of Maryland Medical Center would never have attempted before 9/11.

DENNIS SHRADER, UNIV. OF MARYLAND MEDICAL SYSTEM: What we realized after 9/11 is that we could be faced with an incident of 200, 300, 400, 500 people in a very short period of time, which caused us to have to change our thinking and our assumptions...

KOCH: Every volunteer patient had to be sprayed down, put through a decontamination tent.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's almost like in an assembly line. Someone's cutting clothes, someone's washing, and so forth.

KOCH: The Air Force set up a mobile hospital to handle overflow. Still, an hour and a half in, the facility was overwhelmed.

COL. TY PUTNAM, AIR FORCE TRAUMA SURGEON: We expected bottlenecks at triage, we expected bottlenecks here. On a normal trauma day, here, a very busy trauma day, shock trauma, is 40 patients in a 24-hour period. They just received a hundred patients in an hour and a half. DR. TOM SCALEA, UNIV. OF MARYLAND SHOCK TRAUMA CENTER: We ran out of equipment. We would run out of equipment at times if this was real. You learn to improvise. This is not going to be a totally smooth process.

KOCH: Communications and heat, too, presented problems.

(on camera): The heat in the decontamination suits got so intense they had to stop the entire exercise for about 15 minutes. Something, obviously, they could not do during a real life disaster.

KOCH: One city, now one step closer to being prepared for the unthinkable. Kathleen Koch, CNN, Baltimore.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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