The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio —The technicians on the Columbus Fire Division bomb squad still stick their necks out when the job calls for it.
But more often these days, some of the risk on bomb runs and suspicious package calls is shouldered by squad members that don’t have necks to stick out.
The use of robots in hazardous law-enforcement operations was highlighted during the recent investigation of Aurora, Colo., mass murder suspect James Holmes.
It was a robot that first entered Holmes’ booby-trapped apartment through a third-floor window, then began disarming explosive devices and gathering evidence against the man charged with shooting dozens of moviegoers, 12 of them fatally.
With five of its own robots, the Columbus bomb squad has the same capability to deal remotely with an array of potentially explosive runs, from handling stashes of aging dynamite to unzipping the pockets on a suspicious backpack or suitcase.
Each robot has its specialties. The smaller models are nimble enough to stack coins or lift an envelope. They can squeeze down the aisle of an airliner, peek around corners or climb a set of stairs.
The biggest, known as Boz, can drag a wounded man to safety, flip a car on its side or rip open its trunk.
Because the squad serves 36 counties, the robots travel throughout Ohio with their human counterparts.
A mutual-aid agreement, which was designed to bolster emergency preparedness statewide, calls for reimbursement to agencies rendering aid but also allows those agencies to absorb the costs if they see fit.
Saltsman said the city sometimes seeks reimbursement but often takes runs in many areas that can’t afford their own bomb squad.
“Some of these are two-police towns,” said bomb technician Tom Hughes.
“It’s everything from here east to the border and then down through Athens,” saidFirefighter William Ehrgood, a division spokesman.
Capt. Steve Saltsman, who oversees the bomb squad, said the division bought its first robot in the mid-1990s. That unit has been upgraded through the years but remains in service.
The robots resemble remote-controlled vehicles or Pixar’s WALL-E more than they do the robot that warned Will Robinson of danger in the old TV show Lost in Space.
They can cost well above $100,000, although federal grant money is usually available for such purchases. When Columbus bought Boz about five years ago, $300,000 in homeland security grants paid for it. The city kicked in $3,000, city officials said at the time.
The city’s bomb squad responded to 377 calls in 2011.
During a Labor Day 2009 shootout on N. 4th Street that left two police officers wounded, one of the squad’s robots rolled up to shooter Jason Farnsworth’s apartment, smashed out a window, and confirmed with video images that he was dead.
Robots were called upon to handle several suspicious cases placed outside the AEP building Downtown last month by a man threatening violence, and it was a robot that opened a package last week that had been left on the doorstep of Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady on the same day that bomb threats emptied the county courthouse.
Nothing dangerous was found in either case.
The Franklin County sheriff’s office also has a bomb squad, which works and trains closely with the city squad, Sheriff Zach Scott said.
The office’s two robots aren’t used only on bomb runs, he said.
“They can look in windows; they can look in homes,” Scott said. “Sometimes we use them for SWAT. In a haz-mat situation, they have the ability to go up and sample the air. Some of it is how creative the operators are.”
The robots’ true value is in limiting the exposure of the technicians.
“We’re all willing to put that bomb suit on,” Saltsman said. But “if we can minimize that, that’s a plus.”
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