Wednesday, March 31, 2004 | 9:59 a.m.
A huge fireball blasted more than 100 feet into the air in the desert northeast of Nellis Air Force Base on Tuesday, demonstrating the destructive force used in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people.
Today, law enforcement agents from across the county and around the world will examine the explosion as part of an FBI training course designed to test the abilities of explosives experts in analyzing the crime scenes left behind by a terrorist attack.
FBI Special Agent Kevin Miles holds about 15 of the four-day courses every year, including an annual stop at Nellis Air Force Base. Miles, who works out of the Los Angeles FBI office, said the class was envisioned as Ph.D.-level training for bomb technicians, but the course has been expanded to include local law enforcement because of increased terrorist activity.
"There are over 400 people waiting to get into this class now," Miles said Tuesday before the detonation of high explosives in a car and a tractor-trailer. "We've got police, firefighters, military and FBI in the class. We've also got two policemen from Greece."
Several of the upcoming classes will be attended by officers from Athens in preparation for the Summer Olympics, said Ben Hoge, a course instructor and commander of the Las Vegas Fire Department Bomb Squad.
The course was started in 1998, and 53 classes have been held since then. The course includes two days of classroom training focused on major cases such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The final two days of the course are spent investigating an actual explosion. Students submit the evidence they find to a U.S. Attorney to examine.
"This training offers us a real-world opportunity to go out and work with a crime scene instead of looking at it in a book," Hoge said. "The training is very important, but it doesn't portend another attack. We've seen large explosions caused by devices carried in vehicles over the years, up to the most recent railway incident in Spain.
"We can only prepare for something like this and hope it doesn't happen. If it does we want to be ready to investigate."
About half of Hoge's bomb squad has already been through the training.
Bob Heckman, a retired FBI special agent who worked the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, teaches the forensic portion of the course that involves collecting evidence at ground zero of a detonation.
"They'll be looking for component pieces of the vehicle, pieces of the power source and swabbing for explosive residue," Heckman said. "They're looking for anything that will tell us what kind of explosive it was and who may have set it."
Tuesday's explosions were designed to simulate a scenario similar to the October 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia that killed 202 people. In those attacks a van loaded with explosives exploded, and shortly after that another bomb exploded in the area.
The combination of the car bomb and the truck bomb detonated on Air Force property gave students two separate crime scenes to investigate today.
"The blast from the truck would have spread debris over 16 city blocks if this was in a city," Heckman said. "We haven't found a mayor that will let us do an explosion in a city yet, so we end up coming out to places in the desert where we have a lot of space."
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