‘Fire in the hole!’: On the job with the Las Vegas bomb squad

Four milk jugs filled with gasoline were wrapped in detonation cord outside a Las Vegas Fire Department training center on Wednesday.

Bomb squad technician Mark Duncan yelled, “Fire in the hole!” three times.

A loud bang sent a fireball about 10 feet into the air of the eastern valley and a large plume of black smoke even higher into the clear desert sky. Duncan said the explosive weight of the blast, part of a media demonstration, was the equivalent 0.11 pounds of TNT.

Cmdr. Shon Saucedo said team members wear two hats. The unit investigates arsons within Las Vegas city limits, but also serves as the bomb squad for all of Southern Nevada.

“We’re the law enforcement wing of Las Vegas Fire Rescue,” Saucedo said.

The squad has two bomb response trucks. From inside, team members can remotely control robots and conduct X-rays of possible explosive packages, Capt. Jamie Sypniewicz said. The screens in the truck displayed an example of an X-ray of a pipe bomb in a bag.

“There’s several things that we look for in order to determine whether we can send a person down there on it or not,” Sypniewicz said.

“This is basically a giant toolbox,” she said of the truck.

Technicians Hoyt Jarrard and Chris Henderson demonstrated what two of the bomb squad’s robots can do.

An older and larger F6 has a weapons platform, three cameras and an extending arm. Henderson remotely controlled the robot to pick up an orange traffic cone and carry it to drop onto a nearby cone. He said the F6 could lift about 100 pounds.

“If we can send a robot down range first that’s what we will do,” Henderson said.

Jarrard controlled a newer and smaller ICOR Mini-Caliber, used to maneuver in smaller areas. He said different calls require using robots to retrieve items or use the weapons on board to open them up.

“We could have to move stuff out the way just to just to get to the thing that we want to see,” Jarrard said.

If a robot is not an option, bomb technicians wearing protective suits have to go into the field to respond to a possible explosive.

A Med-Eng EOD 9N bomb suit worn by fire explorer Kevin Winston weighs about 90 pounds and offers thermal protection, over pressure protection and fragmentation protection.

Capt. Richard Brooks said the suit was “like wearing a queen-sized mattress.”

“It’s really hard to put on by yourself,” he said. “If you have two people helping you that know what they’re doing, you can get this thing on in under two minutes.”

He said each of the team’s 12 technicians has their own suit.

The bomb squad also uses explosives to open suspicious packages or conduct demolition work. Lt. Andrew Lewis demonstrated three different firing devices. He said each technician has their preferred method, and his is a shotgun primer device rather than an electric firing device or a remote firing device.

“This one works every time,” Lewis said.

Saucedo said he hoped the event would help inform the community about what the bomb squad does to keep the community safe and that despite the technology, people make up the heart of the team.

“At the very end of the day a human being, a bomb technician has to go over that device and deem it safe,” Saucedo said.

Contact David Wilson at dwilson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @davidwilson_RJ on Twitter.