They described him as a 57-year old, 6'2" truck driver weighing 198 pounds. He smoked two packs a day and had been exposed to a nerve agent. I could see his chest rise and fall and his pupils dilate. A large needle stuck out from a vein in his upper arm, and he was hooked up to a wall of computers that blinked and flashed digital numbers.

I wanted to call him a "dummy," but trainers at Texas A&M Fire School's Emergency Services Training Institute said "mannequin simulator" was more appropriate, considering his price tag. This machine could be programmed to represent either sex with a variety of physical characteristics, ailments or combinations of diseases in all kinds of scenarios. Replaceable extremity parts could simulate amputation or other injury. The Office of Domestic Preparedness has funded 11 of them for training EMS personnel around the nation for weapons of mass destruction incidents.

The EMS mannequin simulator was just one of the many marvels I found during my visit to ESTI in College Station, Texas. ESTI is a division of Texas Engineering Extension Service under the Texas A&M University System. The facility covers 123 acres and employs more than 160 personnel.

What I saw that day was absolutely mind-boggling. Settings for live-burn training fires included a refinery, shipboard, rail cars, aircraft and others. Training structures were an assortment of burn buildings, but rescue scenarios also could be practiced in different size structures and tanks, confined spaces, rubble piles, collapsible buildings and more.

According to Program Manager Mike Wisby, ESTI is the largest, hands-on emergency services training school in the world, hosting 120,000 students from more than 45 countries. I don't think there is a scenario that ESTI couldn't replicate for training purposes.

Its "Disaster City" features a residential home, a strip mall and a multi-story office building with collapsible floors and replaceable concrete panels for realistic rescue training. Rail cars can be strategically piled on top of each other and filled with local students -- day or night -- to create a major disaster scenario.

ESTI annual training fire schools include Spanish, industrial and a weeklong Municipal Fire Training School in July that has drawn more than 3,000 participants.

The National Emergency Response & Rescue Training Center is also established at TEEX. NERRTC's Emergency Operations Center offers a 3 1/2-day training program to mayors can bring all department heads -- fire, police, EMS, public works, utilities -- to train together for major disasters. The mayor and his staff establish the EOC and work with NERRTC's instructors through major disaster simulations made realistic with 13 cameras strategically placed in the Incident Command Post in Disaster City.

ESTI's latest venture is a 20-hour course on the Incident Management System. In partnership with the Phoenix Fire Department, ESTI will hold the course at the Command Training Center in Phoenix, Ariz. The 20-hour program is open to all career, combination or volunteer officers. According to Wisby, the course is based on Alan Brunacini's book Fire Command, second edition. For more information about the Command Training Center, call 1-979-845-7641.

The Emergency Services Training Institute and the TEEX site in College Station are a must-see for anyone involved in emergency response. I had to agree with the Houston Chronicle, which called it  "the Disney World for fire and rescue." If you can dream it, they can probably train you for it.

Janet Wilmoth, Editor