Hi I'm Bob Rhoades and this is my page. As I stumble onto things I'll post them here and hope they'll be of interest to all of you.

I recently served as a controller for an exercise up in New England.  This was a combined exercise based on the dispersion of Anthrax.  This in itself makes it a terrorist incident.  Present at the exercise were fire, EMS, Hospitals, Emergency Management???and one lone policeman.

Unfortunately this is not an exception but pretty much the rule when it comes to exercises, law enforcement just doesn?t show up most of the time. Although in most every case, the training of our law…

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After 30 years in the fire service, the last six as a hazmat tech for the state of Ohio, I thought I was pretty sharp about dealing with hazardous materials.  Then I transferred to the Health Department as an emergency response coordinator.  Then 9/11 happened.  Suddenly I needed to know a whole lot about some things that I knew very little about.  My colleagues at the health department needed to know about response too.  So the die was cast and we forged ahead.

 

The…

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There has been a lot of questions concerning ISO ratings in our area. I've compiled some information written from reading everything I could find on the subject. The ISO website is very good and the information is easy to find.k Check it out on my Blogspot: http://ning.it/b9VKoh

I have retired and am now trying to figure out what to do when I don't have to do anything.

At a recent full scale exercise I was the fire controller and an old acquaintenance of my was the evaluator. This was an IED type exercise at a school football game. Initial response was from the Twp. PD who did an excellent job of taping off the area and controlling the scene. The fire department arrived on the scene with a command vehicle, turned on the big green light and never stepped foot in it again. It was hard to watch an incident like this because the safety of responders was in… Continue