Looking for Trouble

When you start looking into the kinds of equipment that will help your squad detect and monitor the host of weapons of mass destruction potentially out there today, it can get to feeling like science fiction pretty quick. Product specs talk about infrared and laser beams, gas ionization, flame separators and surface acoustics--each one a different method to produce a molecular "fingerprint" of a substance that you may or may not be able to see, feel or smell. At a price tag in the tens of thousands, this might be fine if the equipment just worked--if you didn't have to understand it any better than the average user of a telephone or television has to understand digital technology.

     But this is not the case with WMD monitors and detectors, says Chris Hawley, whose Computer Sciences Corp. job title comes right out of sci-fi as well: program manager for counter-proliferation training. Well known in the emergency response industry for WMD and hazmat training, Hawley makes the point that most of the science for detecting and monitoring all these things we now call CBRNE is up to 25 years old--in laboratory settings. "It's not new technology," he says. "It's only new to first responders." What is new is the miniaturization of the engineering, which translates it for the field. That means there are bound to be some things lost in the translation, including reliability and the technical expertise of the user.

     "I'm torn," says Hawley. "I'm excited about the technology and the possibilities, but we have to increase our level of education on how to use these devices and interpret the readings they provide for us."

Raman and FT-IR Technology
     Preferring to talk about the technologies rather than specific brands, Hawley says he is most excited by the potential of Raman technology, an innovative method that derives a substance's fingerprint by using a laser beam to scatter molecules. "It's a comparable technology to the FT-IR [Fourier-transform infrared] spectrometer, and once they work some of the bugs out, it's going to be a better technology because it has the ability to shoot through glass, shoot through a container," he says, giving it an advantage because it offers the responder a safe barrier. Noting that you are still within a couple of millimeters of the substance, "the good thing is you don't have to open the container to come up with a possible identity."

     The Ahura Corp., based in Wilmington, MA, received a Frost & Sullivan Innovative Technology Award in August for its handheld First Defender, a Raman instrument that looks like a TV remote on steroids. Built to military requirements, it has been optimized to the needs of the civilian first responder. Completely self-contained and lightweight (4 lbs.), it works by a "point-and-shoot" method designed for ease of use in the quick (under 6o seconds) identification of solid and liquid chemical weapons, toxic industrial chemicals (TICs), white powders, narcotics, contraband, forensics and explosives. Operating on a five-hour battery, it is waterproof, chemically resilient and "reads" the substance through glass or plastic--it does not have to "consume" it--thereby preserving evidence.

     But it's not all there yet, says Hawley, cautioning that Raman technology will not have those bugs worked out for another year or two, and that providers need to be aware of potential false negatives, particularly when reading chemical compounds and mixtures. A false negative presents a lethal potential.

     Raman's cousin, FT-IR uses an infrared beam to separate the molecules into vibrations with light and identifies the substance by its reflection. It has the same hurdle to overcome as Raman. Still, "FT-IR is sound technology; it's good technology," says Hawley, "and when Smiths Detection (formerly Environmental Technology Group) bought SensirIR [FT-IR products: HazmatID and GasID], they bought one of the best libraries, hands down. There are a lot of FT-IRs out there, but the Sensir library is one of the more robust."

Ion Mobility Spectrometry
     Better positioned at this time, says Hawley, are the ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) devices. Like the name implies, IMS technology uses a gas ionization process.

     "When the gas goes across whatever the source happens to be--as an example, in Smiths Detection's APD2000, it's a radiation source that causes the ionization--it rips an electron out of the outermost shell to look at the positive and negative charges, creating the fingerprint," Hawley says. Furthermore, the accuracy issues in IMS technology tend to involve false positives, which are less worrisome than false negatives.

     "You've seen IMS technology in the airport when they wave that wand around someone," says Missy Robinson, marketing executive at Smiths Detection, which makes a lot of those airport scanners. "That's a piece of fabric that will pick up trace particulates--they take that fabric and put it into a machine that tells within a couple seconds whether there's a presence of narcotics or explosives." The company's emergency response devices are basically the same technology, only smaller and self-contained, she says.

     The APD2000, priced at $10,000, detects chemical warfare agents and civilian threats from TICs. "The APD," says Robinson, "is a trace analysis system focusing specifically on WMD--nerve and blister agents, pepper sprays and mace. You've seen law enforcement walking around with these over their shoulders at all the major parades, because they're constantly monitoring to see if any type of chemical warfare agents have come into play."

     The Department of Homeland Security is buying them in bulk, says Robinson, ostensibly including them in domestic preparedness assistance packages.

     Another standout device in this class also comes from Smiths: The Sabre 4000. This device, about the size of a kid's toy space gun, can detect trace chemical weapons, TICs and TIMs, narcotics and explosives in both vapor and particulate forms. It was Frost & Sullivan's 2005 Chemical Detection Product of the Year.

     "There are two different modes to the Sabre 4000 system," explains Robinson, "a particulate mode and a vapor mode. With the particulate mode, you swab the area of analysis with a specially treated swab and then enter it into a small chamber in the front of the Sabre system, which heats it up and sucks the particulate into the chamber, where it performs the analysis. That mode is for explosives and narcotics. The vapor mode analyzes the chemical warfare agents and the TICs."

     There is also a spinoff of this device, called the Sabre FR, designed especially for first responders, which only analyzes vapors. "It's for the hazmat technician looking for traces of chemical warfare and TICs," says Robinson.

     Note that all three Smiths devices are looking for trace material, whether particulate or vapor, for instances where you cannot see or feel the agent but have reason to suspect something could be there. "If you come across a suspicious white powder and you're trying to figure out what it is, you shouldn't be using this system," Robinson says. "These systems are for trace."

     There are also flame spectrophometers for gas detection (such as Proengin's AP2C) and surface acoustical wave (SAW) technologies that utilize piezoelectric quartz crystals coated in polymers to identify chemicals, as well as detectors that combine these technologies, as does Thermo Electron's PID/FID combination and SAIC's SAW/IMS tool. But issues of size, ease of use, sensitivity, reliability or availability put these technologies beyond the scope of this article.

And Then There's Smart Strip
     "A $20 strip of vinyl and paper about the size of a baseball card," as the website from Safety Solutions Inc. in Boynton Beach, FL, describes it, the ubiquitous HazMat Smart Strip chemical ID card "changes color when exposed to hazardous chemicals such as chlorine, fluoride, various nerve agents, oxidizers, arsenic, sulfides and cyanide in liquid or aerosol form."

     Safety Solutions also makes the Smart M-8 Nerve Agent Detector that sells for about $6 a pop, meets military specifications and instantly identifies toxic nerve (V, G, H) agents; Watersafe, a comprehensive drinking water test kit for the field that checks for bacteria, lead, pesticides, nitrates, nitrites, chlorine, pH and water hardness for $17 per test; and the Radalert 50, a handheld instrument selling in the low $300s that monitors for alpha, beta, gamma and x-radiation and operates up to three months continuously on a 9-volt alkaline battery.

Conclusion
     It bears repeating that responders need to understand the limitations of each device or product, and not be tempted to make decisions based on the data of just one. "We have to make decisions based on a number of factors, not on what one detection device tells you," says Hawley. "Sometimes the humans on the scene are the best source of the information. If the chemical detection device tells you there's a chemical nerve agent present, but the humans aren't showing any symptoms, I'm going to be more likely to think the humans are correct and the machine is not." More important, if the detector is telling you there's nothing present but people are displaying symptoms, "then," Hawley says, "you have to listen to the humans."