A cool mist rises from the woods as Chief Janet Morgan boards a maroon and white Texas A&M University shuttle bus at a hotel in College Station, Texas. It's early, 7:30 a.m. The passengers, who met last night, talk quietly as the bus careens down a residential back road before turning into an unmarked gate near the back of the university's airport.

Morgan has 27 years in the fire service and is the chief and fire marshal of Woodbury, Conn., a small New England town. “On the bus that morning I didn't know what to expect,” Morgan says. “I wondered why I was taking a week out of a very busy schedule and flying to Texas.”

Heads turn as the bus enters Disaster City, a 52-acre training facility complete with full-scale, collapsible structures designed to simulate various wreckage. As home of the Emergency Operations Training Center, Disaster City is just one portion of a larger emergency response training facility that includes the Brayton Fire Training Field. Brayton Field is the largest training facility of its kind in the United States and includes buildings, towers, tanks, industrial plant structures and a ship that are used during lifelike, live-fire training simulations.

The bus slowly winds between several overturned and twisted passenger train cars; it passes search-and-rescue personnel and canines attending the morning class at one of Disaster City's collapsible structures. The bus stops at a low, brown metal building, and the participants file into a room about the size of a high school gymnasium. Dominated by three large video screens, the room is set up with five sections of tables along the periphery and 40 seats at tables facing the screens.

Morgan and 39 others, who hold different positions from jurisdictions throughout the United States, are at the center for the Enhanced Incident Management/Unified Command Course. Using the National Incident Management System, this management-level course develops the incident-management and decision-making skills necessary to respond to a large-scale chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or explosive terrorism incident.

The E-IM/CU course is funded through a U. S. Department of Homeland Security grant to the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center, which is a division of the Texas A&M System's Texas Engineering Extension Service. Since its inception in 1998, the center has delivered more than 6,400 CBRNE and all-hazards preparation and response courses to more than 250,000 emergency responders, representing some 8,200 local and state jurisdictions in all 50 states and six U.S. territories.

Because the participants have such varied backgrounds, the course begins by familiarizing them with the unified command, the Incident Command System organization and the duties of each section and position.