Montco Officials Blow Up Mass Transit Bus For Training Exercise
By Brad Segall
NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CBS) -- An extensive training session in Montgomery County yesterday brought a number of law enforcement agencies together to learn how to secure and process a scene after there's been an explosion.
The training exercise consisted of blowing up a mass transit bus which contained artifacts from both the "victims" and the "perpetrator" -- items such as cell phones, keys, wallets and wedding rings.
The goal of participants was to collect as much as they could from the debris field, identify the people inside, and prepare the scene for prosecution if it was a criminal act.
Kimberlee Moran, a forensic archeologist from Rutgers University in Camden, called the training (which took place at an undisclosed location in Montgomery County) successful.
"We had the bus, we had all these objects that were planted on the bus, we had a debris field of about 100 feet on either side," she says, "and we were able to process the scene, recover all the evidence, and actually tidy everything up in about four hours."
The key, she says, is getting all of the agencies, civilian and law enforcement, working on the same page.
Montgomery County sheriff Eileen Behr called the timing of today's event critical, given that the training came just days after a man was arrested for plotting to blow up the Federal Reserve in Manhattan.
