Florida National Guard conducting multiagency preparedness exercise

TAMPA, Fla. - For the last few days, the Florida National Guard has been conducting a multi-agency training exercise throughout Tampa Bay. Sunday, they focused their efforts on Channelside where they tested their ability to detect and identify threats from pharmaceutical-based agents.

Pharmaceutical-based agents, like fentanyl, can be extremely dangerous and sometimes deadly. It's why training on how to deal with them is so important.

"It's important to recognize that this is a crime scene so the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in this case, has jurisdiction and what we're doing is assisting our federal to make sure that they're safe in conducting their crime scene analysis," Florida Army National Guard Lt. Col. Mark Bianchi said.

The mock crime scene for the training exercise was the SS American Victory, which is docked in Channelside and currently serves as a museum. The situation involved fentanyl being smuggled onto the boat.

"In this scenario, sailors were bringing this in from a foreign port, and they were trying to introduce the precursor agents, pharmaceutical-based materials, and substances here in the Port of Tampa and the FBI had a federal search warrant and initiated a federal search warrant for the assistance of the search project," Bianchi said.

More than 40 personnel from the FBI and the Florida Army National Guard as well as seven other Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams from six other states participated in the exercise. The support team tracked the pharmaceutical-based agent to this utility closet on the boat, but the scenario doesn't end there and will continue Monday.

As part of the training, teams have to be especially careful when taking off their protective suits. For this scenario teams worked in pairs helping to clean the other's suits before cutting them out of it. It's important training to keep the U.S. safe from any threats.

"We do it 24/7 365. It's our primary task is to keep the homeland safe. And because we've got so many partners working on it, I think the people at home can rest assured that for the most part, we're doing exactly that," Bianchi said.