Monday, April 23, 2001

By Anthony Burgos, Sigonella Bureau

Anthony Burgos / Stars and Stripes Lt. Cmdr. Kari Buchanan, left, and Petty Officer 3rd Class Lacey Sanders prepare to test suspected chemical munitions during an exercise at Naval Air Station Sigonella, Sicily.

NAVAL AIR STATION SIGONELLA, Sicily — A special unit based at NAS Sigonella dressed up like the cast of a sci-fi movie Thursday. Sailors from Naval Environmental Preventive Medicine Unit 7 donned blue space suits instead of their uniforms as part of an exercise.

Members deploy to areas to test for diseases and other environmental factors that could make troops sick. Thursday’s training familiarized the team with multilayered vinyl vapor-proof suits and other protective gear it would use when surveying a chemically contaminated site.

"The suits give us Level A protection, the highest for toxic industrial chemical suits," said team manager Lt. Cmdr. Kari Buchanan. Along with the suits, the team uses special masks, gloves, boots, breathing devices and two-way radios. They even have special vests lined with chemical cooling packs to stay comfortable when body heat gets trapped in the outfit.

As Buchanan and teammate Petty Officer 3rd Class Lacey Sanders walked past the base child development center, bowling alley and gym, passers-by didn’t even flinch.

"The equipment is similar to that of fire departments back in the States," said team leader Capt. Edward Kilbane. "People are in tune with our mission. They are in the military, too, so they know how important our job is. Plus, we gave them a heads-up in the base paper last week."

Buchanan and Sanders ended up in the Iraqi desert. Sort of. They were actually in the "lemon lot," a parking area designated for used cars that are for sale.

During their drill, they tested powder near mock chemical munitions. As their facemasks started fogging over and the sounds of their breathing tanks became heavier, they dipped M8 paper, designed to indicate what chemicals were present, into a fake weapon canister. Throughout the mission, they kept in touch with the command post where other suited-up teams were awaiting reports of casualties and were ready to decontaminate those on the scene.

Petty Officer 1st Class Robert Chew and Petty Officer 2nd Class Mike Conner, two sailors from the Navy’s disease vector ecological control center in Jacksonville, Fla., were in Sigonella for the training. They were the ones who washed people off with a bleach-based decontamination solution.

"It’s a big responsibility, but also physically demanding," Chew said. "But we are two big guys. We could carry people out if we had to."

Sigonella’s unit is one of four in the fleet. "In a real situation, we’d go to a country where troops would deploy and test the area to see if there are hazards," Kilbane said. "For example, before building barracks, we would check to see if the site might have toxins present from an old factory."

Thursday’s exercise was designed to get the team up to speed on the equipment. By 2004, the Navy plans to have all of its preventive medicine teams trained and ready to deploy all over the world.

Even without the advanced chemical protection suit training, the unit has been an asset to other branches of the service and to NATO.

"We recently assessed an area of Albania where NATO and Partnership for Peace forces took part in exercise Cornerstone 2001," said Cmdr. Charles Rhodes, the unit’s officer in charge.

"We are like the opposite of the Sierra club," Rhodes said. "They protect the environment from people. We protect people from the environment."

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