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Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory: The U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal has played a central role in the history of American rocketry and missile defense.

The Army post—which calls Madison County, Alabama, home—has tenants across the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and NASA.

But did you know that the storied installation also houses an elite FBI school charged with training our nation’s civilian public safety bomb technicians?

Each year, FBI special agents, firefighters, police, and federal sworn law enforcement officers from across the country head to Redstone to study at the FBI’s Hazardous Devices School (or HDS). As former HDS Director and retired Supervisory Special Agent Jay Henze explains...

Retired SSA Jay Henze: ...we certify, recertify, and accredit bomb squads and bomb technicians.
Oprihory: Students return home as experts in responding to, analyzing, and defusing these explosive risks.

Oprihory: They also return as ambassadors for the kind of interagency collaboration that powers the school’s world-class training.

On this episode of our podcast, we give you a rare look inside HDS to learn how the Bureau molds the world’s foremost civilian public-safety bomb techs; what it takes to join their humble, but elite, ranks; and what inspires these public servants to put their lives on the line on a daily basis to keep communities safe.

I'm Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory, and this is Inside the FBI.

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Oprihory: “Here I am. Send me.”

This quote from the biblical book of Isaiah can be found all over the FBI’s Hazardous Devices School– from the face of a memorial to fallen bomb techs to a tattoo on the arm of one of the school’s instructors.

In its original context, the quote is a prophet’s response to a call from his higher power.

But for America’s bomb tech community, the words represent the solemn call that bomb techs have dedicated their careers to answering, and the sense of self-sacrifice required to heed it.

Joe Davidson: I have seen some other organizations, both military and law enforcement, that use it. However, we're probably the ones that claim it and use it more than most.

Oprihory: That’s HDS Instructor Joe Davidson. The Marine Corps veteran’s time working beside military explosive ordnance disposal experts inspired him to become a public safety bomb tech with the Pennsylvania State Police. He’s been teaching at HDS since 2016.

Davidson: Regardless of your faith, I think everybody can appreciate that statement from the standpoint of, you are now sort of recognizing that you're going to give yourself to whatever the problem happens to be, right? You know, you're voluntarily stepping forward and assuming a responsibility—and with that, some inherent danger to solve that problem, not for your own betterment, but for the betterment of your community, the people that are around you.

It's a natural fit for us.

It's a volunteer group of folks. And it's a bit cliché, to be honest. But it's the idea of: Everybody else is evacuating and moving away, and you're the person that's going to show up and say, “Okay: I'll figure this out and I'm going to go towards whatever that problem is and burden myself to resolve that for everyone.”

Oprihory: But, contrary to popular belief, bomb techs aren’t usually thrill-seekers.

Davidson: It's something that we usually have to tell the students when they get here as part of their own self-evaluation: If you are an adrenaline junkie, you're probably not placed in the right career field, because this job should be painfully boring if you're doing it properly, right? Because it really goes back to you making good assessments and decisions that are going to keep people safe.

Oprihory: Henze, a former local law enforcement officer who eventually became an FBI special agent bomb technician, agreed.

Henze: There's a technical piece to it. There's a science piece to it. There's a common-sense piece to it. And there's translating what you know into your hands. Can you take what you know and actually do some skill with your hands that would involve what we do?

And by the way, it might kill you.

Davidson: It’s more science-based and knowledge-collection-based than some sort of game of chance where your brow is sweating and you're trying to figure out, “Should I cut the red wire or the blue wire?”
If you found yourself at that point in your career, you probably made about a hundred other mistakes that got you to that point.

Davidson: We tell the students, “Go home educate your loved ones, because when you go out the door on a call, they should understand what we just talked about, which is you're a problem-solver.”
You know, we can sometimes close a road and cause a traffic jam, and your average citizen sees the traffic jam, and that's all they really know. But they don't realize that there's somebody in a bomb suit that's walking down here right now, making a life-and-death decision.

Oprihory: According to Davidson, bomb techs trade fear for focus by keeping their operational to-do lists front-of-mind.

Davidson: I have a series of tasks that I need to perform. I've got to capture an x-ray. I have to use tools. I have to make decisions.

If you were just a person strapped in a roller coaster, you have nothing to occupy your mind other than what's going on, right? If you're down there doing this technical job, you have a whole laundry list of things that are rolling through your head. And, usually, whenever the weird spidey sense pops up, it will go away because you become task-oriented.

Henze: As bomb technicians, we're surrounded by community members that want to do the right thing. We don't want to embarrass ourselves in front of them. We want to perform.

Some people bring faith into it. Some people, you know, they've done it before in the military and they're just comfortable with it and they like the excitement of it.

For me, I'm thinking. I'm assessing situations. I'm using threat-assessment training that we have. The technology is amazing nowadays. We use all sorts of different tools in our toolbox to deal with a suspicious item. And so, I think that takes a lot of that worry away.

But you don't really know until you're there doing it. So all we can do is as-real-as-we-can-get-it training.

***

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Oprihory: The history of the Hazardous Devices School begins in 1971, when the U.S. Army founded the Hazardous Devices Course at Redstone Arsenal. The course was developed in response to timely issues including the end of the Vietnam War, and bombings and other incidents that were happening on American soil.

Henze: Back in the seventies, there was a lot of civil unrest going on in the country. A lot of explosive threats were happening throughout different parts of the country, and law enforcement at the time had no bomb techs. There wasn't even a school.

They relied heavily on the military. The EOD community had been in multiple war theaters; they were the experts. And so, they law enforcement would rely on military capability to help them on different events.

Well, that that could pose a problem, as there's a separation of powers there. They don't have certain authorities domestically. And so, a group of men who were on local law enforcement throughout different parts of the country were concerned with this and were able to petition Congress to start a school because of the need.

Oprihory: At the time, the Army’s Hazardous Devices Division led explosive ordnance disposal training for the entire military at Redstone Arsenal. Tapping the Division to provide parallel training for civilians just made sense.

What initially began as an approximately three-weeklong course on the basics of working with explosives eventually expanded in length.

Kent Hamann: And then, at some point they said, “Well, we've got to recertify these guys and show them new developments,” so they added the recertification program.

Oprihory: That’s Kent Hamann, a retired Army EOD technician and instructor who now leads curriculum at HDS. He arrived at Redstone Arsenal in 1999, tasked with teaching newly minted soldiers how to be military bomb techs. These days, he molds the FBI’s training for local, state, and federal civilian bomb technicians.

The FBI started sending agents to take the course on a space-available basis in the 1970s.

In 1981, the Bureau took over financial and administrative responsibilities for the course. That funding allowed the Army to hire military civilians to help develop training.

A year later, the FBI created the Special Agent Bomb Technician career field to fill a need for civilian responders to hazardous materials incidents.

In 2004, the Bureau opened HDS as we now know it. At the time, then-FBI Executive Assistant Director Grant Ashley noted that the school was one of “only two bomb training facilities of this caliber in the world,” the other being based in the United Kingdom.

Hamann: Redstone itself was an Army training facility.

Oprihory: Redstone housed advanced individual training, or AIT, for a lot of jobs related to explosives, ammunition, explosive ordnance disposal, missiles, and rockets. But when the Army moved that training from Redstone Arsenal in Alabama to Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia, the Army’s EOD schoolhouse, training, and military instructors went with it.

Hamann: And that was kind of creating a void where the Army Training Command was like, “Why are we training public safety bomb technicians when there's no military attached to it?”

Oprihory: In 2017, the FBI stepped up in response to this need and took over full responsibility for the school—in terms of curriculum, administration, and funding.

Hamann: I was responsible for transitioning from Army curriculum and Army speak to FBI curriculum and FBI speak. And essentially, all that meant was we changed the formatting and we changed the background on the slides.

The Bureau taking over really didn't affect the curriculum of certification and recertification.
The amount of curriculum really increased.

Oprihory: The school added more courses to keep up with the demand for training and created advanced courses to provide them with specialized training.

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Oprihory: A few things set the Hazardous Devices School apart from other training institutions.
The first is that every instructor you’ll meet was first a student in its halls or on its ranges—depending on their generation.

The school’s other standout feature is its variety of true-to-life training settings.

Davidson: From 1971 to the early 2000s, the school had to do a lot of “pretending.”

You would take students out to a large open field where we do our demolitions training, and they would tell you, “Okay, in the middle of the field, pretend that it's a building—a bank or a mall or whatever—and you've got a suspicious package that's out there.” And they were forced to do the best they could with that environment.

In the early 2000s, this school dramatically changed in terms of structure and location.

We moved to the south end of the Arsenal and we built what we refer to as “The Villages.”

The Villages are a series of different training sites that are appropriately distanced from the next and sort of fenced- off from one another for safety purposes. And you can dispatch a team of students to any village with a truck that is outfitted fully with all the equipment. And they can train in a[n] area where you don't have to pretend anymore. They can go to a hospital. They can go to a school. They can go to a commercial setting. It's fleshed out to look as though it's that sort of a structure. At the same time, those buildings are built robustly, so we can use energetic tools in there. We can blow things up within reason. We can exercise some of these tools without worry that we're going to irreparably damage the building.

Oprihory: According to Noah Boyer, a sergeant with the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office in Nevada...

Washoe County (Nevada) Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Noah Boyer: ...we don't get that anywhere else, right? I mean, there's training academies and facilities and stuff like that, but back home, if I went in there and did the shots that we get to do here, it wouldn't last very long, and they'd probably not invite me back.

This is our playground. We get an opportunity to try the new things in real life.

Oprihory: Boyer spoke to us during his most recent recertification course, which graduates are required to complete every three years. When he’s back home in Nevada, he serves as the bomb squad commander for the Northern Nevada Federal Task Force’s Consolidated Bomb Squad.

As HDS student and Salt Lake City Police Department officer Michael Darelli explained...

Salt Lake City Police Department Officer Michael Darelli: ...the FBI establishes the standard of the minimum requirement of what people should know, but also gives you the uniformity and consistency across all agencies.

Oprihory: This lets bomb techs from different agencies and with no history of collaboration hit the ground running.

Darelli: They all have the same baseline training to be able to work with one another and have the same techniques kind of established, so you're not running into differing opinions within different entities. You could, at least, come together and have that concise, equal understanding of the baseline that was taught.

***

Oprihory: So, how does a student end up at HDS? And what does bomb tech training actually look like? Here’s Jay Henze again.

Henze: Every public-safety bomb technician in the U.S., if they are selected to get on their bomb squad, they'll get their initial training here.

Oprihory: Once a state or local law enforcement officer or firefighter is selected for their home bomb squad, they have to take—and pass—an online, weeklong course administered by the Hazardous Devices School. Those who succeed then head to Alabama.

Henze: They spend six weeks here on the campus.

Oprihory: Once at Redstone, he said, students are trained in...

Henze: ...the basics of electricity and how electrical components work, the science of explosives and how explosives actually either explode or deflagrate—

Oprihory: That's just a technical term for a slow burn.

Henze: It depends upon the type of substance that you're dealing with.

Oprihory: HDS students also learn about robotics and rigging—two skillsets that allow bomb techs to move things from a distance—as well as how to capture, develop, and read x-rays.

Henze: We actually took a lot of our x-ray technology, or radiograph technology, from the dental industry. So, a technician can take a piece of equipment, go to wherever the suspect item is, and they can essentially take an x-ray—or what we would call a "photo"—of this item.

And we can develop that and see what's inside the package. That is our bread and butter.

***

Oprihory: They also quickly find out if they can deal with the unique demands of operating in a bomb suit. As Joe Davidson explains:

Davidson: Bomb suits, like anything else, have evolved over time. As they've evolved, they've tried to reduce the weight of the bomb suit, they've tried to improve auditory senses by making the helmet have some electronic capability to amplify surrounding sounds.

Vision is a big one. Flexibility is a big one. As time has passed, the suits have certainly got better at that.

But, at the end of the day, you cannot get away from the fact that you're still taking a person and you're encumbering them with a suit that, for the most part, weighs close to 100 pounds—you know, certainly approaching 100 pounds.

You are reducing their ability to hear, you are reducing their flexibility, and you are reducing their visibility, so you’ve got to keep your head about you. You've got to make decisions, develop a plan, knowing that you're going to be encumbered, you're going to be dealing with some of these diminished senses. And you now have to go down there, while you're wearing this, right?

So, while you’re wearing this and working, you're physically exerting at a higher level than what you normally would be. So, you're starting to breathe harder, your heart rate’s starting to increase, and at the same time, you've got to manage that physiological response and keep your brain engaged because you've got to make technical decisions while you're downrange dealing with whatever that problem happens to be.

My experience here has been, more often than not, their fear or issue that they're having really is more front and center with their lack of familiarity.

So, you can expose them to that environment again and just sort of baby-step your way into it and make them more and more familiar with, “How do I manipulate the suit? How do I change my body movements? If I have to do something, maybe I need to be more conscious of how my body weight is centered.”

Most folks that have that awkward experience in the beginning, a s they start to learn and get a little bit more familiar with it, all of a sudden, that response sort of drops out of sight. They realize, “Hey, I'm okay. I'm in control. I know how to manage this.”

Put them back in the environment, and it will usually improve and get to a point where they can train out of that.

***

Oprihory: During their initial six-week training, students are rigorously—and repeatedly—assessed and tested on classroom knowledge, hands-on technical skills, and safety procedures.

Henze: Are they setting things up right? Are they demonstrating proficiency? Are they safe?

Our standard is very high. There's a reason for that. We want the highest of standards because it matters when they go back. We want them to win. We want them to live. And we don't want the people that they're protecting to get hurt.

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Henze: There's 18 members on our bomb technician memorial wall out front here on the campus. And I don't want their memory to be lost. I don't want it to be sugarcoated or forgotten or not made a big deal.

And that leads into what we call “the deviation spiral.” That is, you have a standard that could be a moral standard or a professional standard or training standard. You get that foundation of safety here at school, and, hopefully, it will carry you the rest of your career.

And over time—due to maybe long nights or laziness, or you're tired, or something's going on at home—you start to deviate from that standard a little. But nothing happens to you. Maybe it's a safety issue, but you made it through the call, and you're good.

And over time, you make these little deviations, and you are really far away from initial standard that you have, but you don't realize it. And then, one day, you do something, and it ends up killing you or a civilian or your partner, and you realize how far you deviated from your initial standard.

We're human. We make mistakes.

And so, we try to impress upon the students here, [the] foundation of safety starts here. There's no reason why you shouldn't take that with you back to the field and apply those standards of safety with everything that you do. We want them to remember those standards, to apply those standards consistently throughout their careers. So they continue on and make it through and win, protecting the public and then thriving when they retire.

***

Oprihory: It's also important to note that HDS doesn't just train novice bomb techs.
Graduates return to the school every three years to attend a mandatory recertification course aimed at keeping their skillsets sharp.

The school also offers additional on-site and offsite courses for experienced bomb techs to stay current on additional, specialized skills or obtain new ones. As Henze says...

Henze: Every year, there's a change with threats.

Oprihory: In response, the school has had to ask itself whether it’s meeting the evolving needs of bomb techs working in the field, and...

Henze: ...are the bomb squads getting the best training in the world?

Oprihory: One fairly recent addition to the school’s advanced offerings has been the Crisis Response Course. This training prepares bomb techs to respond to active-shooter situations where improvised explosive devices may be present.

Davidson: It's now pushing those bomb technicians out of their comfort zone and making them realize, “Hey: We're going to have to work faster. We're going to have to work different. We're going to have to find some different ways to problem-solve through whatever this is because there's competing interests.”

There may be gunfire and a bomb. There may be injured people that are laying there and a bomb, and it's going to start to change some things for them.

What do I have to do? What's a priority right now in this environment is something that probably isn't a priority in another environment because it simply doesn't exist as an issue for them. That sort of logic just builds upon the initial logic of getting everybody together, pointed in the same direction, speaking the same language with a common understanding of how we do business.

***

Oprihory: According to HDS Professional Development Specialist Wayne Forde and Curriculum Specialist Kelly Walker—two FBI professional staff members who help develop multimedia educational content for the school—understanding the bomb tech community’s culture is key to creating meaningful educational content for HDS students.

Professional Development Specialist Wayne Forde: The bomb tech community is very specific, and I just try to use the multimedia that I capture here on the campus to convey not only what they're teaching, but just that bomb tech mentality or the spirit of HDS.

Curriculum Specialist Kelly Walker: We're very fortunate because we are allowed to be immersed in the training, and that has probably helped both Wayne and I succeed in creating things for bomb technicians.
I've been in a bomb suit. Both Wayne and I have been role players in a scenario where the bomb tech has to come in and rescue us from a bomb situation. We have traveled with the courses. We love to get information from students, and we study. You really have to have an understanding of the law enforcement community, and it takes time. And I think that's one of the reasons why we make a great team.

Oprihory: HDS training is also a boon for partner agencies who send students to its halls, since the FBI foots the bill for full time and contract staff hours, equipment, device builds, explosives, supplies, and the studio used to the develop the training. The Bureau also covers the cost of training for its own personnel to stay on the cutting edge of their unique field.

Partner agencies only need to pay for students to travel to and from Alabama, and for their per diem while studying at HDS.

And, once bomb techs complete their initial certification, the Bureau also covers the cost of their mandatory recertification training and any advanced courses they pursue through HDS. And, if an advanced training is offered offsite, Henze added...

Henze: ...we pay for the travel and per diem.

Oprihory: But the long-term payoff of sending students to HDS is the career-long support system they’ll come away with.

Darelli said the relationships fostered at the school and cultivated by the wider bomb tech community afterwards are crucial to mission success. This is because, through the school’s alumni network, HDS graduates can seek help from colleagues who possess in-demand skills or expertise.

Darelli: The goal is to save lives, and we're going to do that by consulting with other people.

Oprihory: And according to current HDS Director and FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jordan Clark, that network runs deep.

Supervisory Special Agent Jordan Clark: The longer you spend in this program, the more you realize there are so many different avenues that you can focus on and get better at—whether it's electronics, understanding the intricacies of explosives and the physics and the chemistry that goes with that.
Oprihory: Techs can also specialize in things like biochemistry, responding to radiological or nuclear incidents, and countering weapons of mass destruction. Then, he said...

Clark: ...there's the tactical world, which is where you take bomb technicians and you train them to a very high level and embed them with SWAT teams or the Bureau Hostage Rescue Team. And then, in all the local departments, they have SWAT teams and tactical bomb technicians in their rank. And so, culturally, it's very similar.

We have a very wide spectrum of personalities, but that's what makes this career field unique.

You can't just have a drawer full of hammers because you're just going to see every problem as a nail. We need some left-handed monkey wrenches in the drawer, too.

A perfect example is our laboratory device examiners. The agents that populate that, they're public-safety bomb technicians, but they spend all their time performing forensic examinations. So it's like a very wide mission space. But we're fortunate in the company we keep with each other, both on the military and public-safety side. There's a lot of liaison there.

***

Oprihory: The future of HDS is looking as impressive as the controlled detonation its instructors allowed me to witness from a distance during my recent trip to Huntsville. Here’s what it sounded like.

[The musical track fades out.]

[An anonymous voice shouts “fire in the hole” and then counts down from three before the explosion occurs.]

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Oprihory: Later, I sat down with Clark to discuss his vision for the next chapter of HDS’ story. Clark started his bomb tech career as an Army EOD specialist. In that capacity, he even led troops in combating explosive threats on the ground during the Iraq War.

After leaving the military, Clark headed to Quantico to attend the FBI Training Academy.

While there, he was recruited to train up and work as a special agent bomb technician—a call that was too good to refuse. And so, within a year of getting his badge and shipping out to his first assignment at the FBI’s Phoenix Division, he found himself at HDS, getting his civilian bomb tech certification.

That was more than a decade ago.

In the years since, he said...

Clark: ...there was kind of a renaissance in terms of capability in the public safety bomb technician community.

The tactical program came online after the Boston bombing.

Stabilization is a big program for us that deals in the counter-WMD [weapon of mass destruction] space.

Oprihory: A quick note for our listeners: Both of the programs he’s referring to are further examples of advanced courses HDS offers.

Clark: And so we are always trying to find the next proactive way to approach training. There's always going to be an evolution of the threat picture, and so, what we're trying to do here is to stay ahead of that so when that threat actually becomes a reality, we're postured to deal with it.

Oprihory: He pointed to the risk posed by unmanned aerial systems, such as drones, as an example of the kind of emerging threat HDS is looking to train its students to respond to.

And when asked about his personal definition of success, he said it comes down to ...

Clark: ... confidence in the product that we are generating, in the form of competent technicians that understand what it is they're up against and that they have received the training that they need to think their way through a problem, even in the absence of maybe the perfect tool to do that. We teach people to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions to beat explosive device threats.

Everybody wants an answer for, “How do you do X as a bomb technician?” But the reality is the threat is a million shades of gray. And so, you have to take the information that you have, evaluate that, formulate a logical plan that's safe and is going to be reliable, repeatable, predictable.

And if we have confidence in our students’ ability to do that when they go out into the world and respond to bomb calls, then we've done our job here.

***

Oprihory: You can visit fbi.gov/tactics to learn more about the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group’s mission and programs, including the Hazardous Devices School.

[The episode's introductory musical track begins again. It has a mysterious mood and prominently features synthesizer pads.]

This has been another production of Inside the FBI.

You can follow us on your favorite podcast player, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also listen to our show via the myFBI Dashboard App. Visit fbi.gov/dashboardapp to learn more. And you can subscribe to email alerts about new episodes at fbi.gov/podcasts.

I'm Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory with the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs. Thanks for listening.

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