Defentect Announces Participation In Simulated Bio-Weapon, Dirty Bomb Attack Exercises
Defentect announced recently that its Defentect gamma radiation detection network will be a participating technology at the Golden Phoenix real world disaster response laboratory environment in San Diego July 21–24.
Federal, state and local agencies will engage in a large-scale terrorism training event led by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection, the County of San Diego, the City of San Diego and U.S. Marine Corps Aircraft Group-46.
Defentect is an unattended gamma radiation detection network that integrates data from a wide-area pervasive grid of sensors to an incident command center. Defentect is networked using IP and managed over the Web.
When high-energy gamma rays from dirty bomb components interact with Gammatect Plus sensors, Defentect's proprietary algorithms analyze the data and alert authorities to radiation that may pose a security threat. Communication features of Defentect provide the ability to receive and process data over a network from the radiation sensor to the command center and to generate notifications to PDAs, cellphones, pagers and other systems. The addition of strategically placed Gammatect Plus sensors enables Defentect to identify radiation-emitting isotopes and provide control over false positive alarms.
Operation Golden Phoenix will focus on simulated bio-weapon and dirty bomb attacks in the Southern California region. Defentect will participate in two scenarios in collaboration with several partners whose technologies include video surveillance, license plate and facial recognition systems.
At Brown Field Airport, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Marine Aircraft Group-46 will staff a security checkpoint where Defentect’s Gammatect Plus sensors monitor for threat-level radiation ¼ mile from a designated area. The integrated Defentect network will detect radiological check sources’ proximity to the security entrance and alert authorities to their presence on cell phones, PDAs and pagers. At San Diego’s Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, Gammatect Plus sensors will be positioned 50 feet from the main entrance in a public safety exercise by the San Diego Police and Fire Departments and Hospital personnel.
Operation Golden Phoenix is a four-day multi-agency collaborative training event designed to assist federal, state and local agencies with large and complex incident response scenarios. The exercise implements FEMA’s concept of an all-hazards approach to emergency management fostering every level of government to partner to achieve common goals. It’s designed to integrate emergency management planning into mainstream policy-making and operational systems.
The lead agency for Golden Phoenix ’08 is U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Many national and international participants and observers from over 100 federal agencies will attend. These include DHS, DOD (U.S. Navy), DEA, FBI, DOJ, DOE, Marine Corps Reserve, California National Guard, NGOs and industry partners.
Defentect will be working with a group of strategically aligned manufacturers and solution providers who together are demonstrating a wide range of incident expertise including the solution integrator, Epsilon Systems Solutions, Inc.; Polimatrix, Inc.; TW Mobile Engineering; QuickSet International, a Moog Company; Global Mesh Technologies; SightLogix, Inc., URS Washington Division and Orsus.