TechX Missions demonstrate innovative crisis technology in challenging environments.

Background: 

• Despite advanced technology and predictive capabilities, natural disasters continue to have major impacts around the world, from hurricanes to floods to volcanoes and more, causing damage to property and presenting life-threatening situations. 
• Major disasters require response teams to perform search and rescue operations to locate, identify and recover victims and survivors. 
• New technologies can assist teams in these operations, facilitating efficiency and potentially saving more lives, while helping to control residual complications related to safety and security.

Scene: 

• A major earthquake in California downs power lines, causing a widespread power outage and sparking a forest fire. 
• Smoke jumpers fly in to begin cutting fire breaks to slow the fire’s destructive path. But the plane experiences a mechanical problem, so the jumpers must jump early, landing in unplanned territory with unknown coordinates. 
• A search, rescue and recovery operation ensues to locate potential survivors. 
• Medical triage teams are activated to handle the resulting medical needs for large numbers of victims.

Background: 

Structural collapses are occurring more and more frequently whether due to:

• Infrastructure vulnerabilities like the Miami condo collapse or the parking garage collapse in New Orleans 
• Those caused by terrorists like the attacks in New York and Oklahoma 
• Natural events such as the earthquakes in Haiti 
• This mission will explore all aspects of this type of emergency from preparation to response to recovery and the technology and training that can help address the issues within this scenario.  

Scene: 

• A large building is damaged, causing a structural collapse. Small sets of debris still falling and settling of materials happening as responders arrive. 
• First responders arrive to assess the structure and stage personnel and equipment.
• Active rescue and recovery operations ensue.
• EMS performs triage as survivors are pulled from the rubble.

Background: 

• As we have seen over recent years, increased civil unrest due to political, cultural, and societal issues has forced first responders and public safety leaders to find new methods to prevent acts of violence, while protecting people’s constitutional right to protest.  
• Law enforcement and public safety teams must use preventative measures in support of peaceful protests, as well as integrate measures to deal with contested protests and potential escalations into riots.  
• These protests are prime targets for individuals and groups seeking to conduct violence or domestic terrorism against our communities. 

Scene: 

• A peaceful protest over a statue escalates into a contested protest with active opposition/counter protesters, random acts of violence, and/or skirmishes between protesters and counter protestors.  
• This further escalates into a riot targeting first responders and public safety teams.  
• The situation then devolves into a full-on riot where people begin looting, destroying businesses, and injuring one another.  
• The coup de grace is a coordinated, combined terrorist attack in which an insurgent group uses the cover of the protest to conduct a large-scale, complex terror attack on crowds and public safety officials.   

Background: 

Border patrol teams have the daily task of monitoring safe and legal entry into the country, or into any defined, secured space where only designated people are permitted to cross a “border” to enter. This mission will explore how to:

• Identify and track personnel coming across the border 
• Locate and track drug supply lines 
• Inspect vehicles at checkpoints and ports of entry  
• Identify potential security threats surrounding the border areas  

Scene: 

• A rancher has been alerted to migrant activity on his property and calls 9-1-1.
• Law enforcement (both local and Custom Border Patrol) surveil the ranch.
• Upon initial approach, it seems there are only a handful of migrants. But as the team gets closer to the border, they encounter a number of injured and dying migrants who need medical assistance.
• Interviews with these individuals reveal that they were brought over by armed men, some of which are now embedding themselves within the migrants to avoid capture.
• Law enforcement teams then begin the process of determining who the criminals are and finding and capturing them. 

Background: 

• The recent past has seen the far-reaching impacts of a global pandemic on local communities in terms of security, safety, communications, and crisis management. 
• During a pandemic, a community’s healthcare system is vulnerable to not only the dangers of handling a contagion, strains on resources, and supply shortages, but also to security threats from external and domestic actors. 
• Unfortunately, times of distress can cause unstable individuals to act upon their anger and frustration and commit potential atrocities, sometimes against the very organizations and teams trying to help them, as in the case of a pandemic hospital under siege.

Scene: 

• An urban regional hospital is near capacity due to a health pandemic. 
• A patient’s family, who have been restricted from entering the facility to see their loved one, experiences a psychiatric breakdown and attack the hospital with homemade explosives, resulting in a mass casualty situation. 
• As law enforcement responds, one of the attackers begins to fire weapons at the officers.
• The scenario requires law enforcement to utilize their SWAT team to enter this dangerous and highly contagious environment to apprehend the attackers. 
• EMS teams must set up an emergency field hospital and triage centers while also dealing with containing the pandemic.