GUARD CIVIL SUPPORT TEAMS GROW IN NUMBER WHILE THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES EVOLVE BEYOND THE ORIGINAL INTENT

The water sparkles in Baltimore's celebrated Inner Harbor as tourists meander past the 150-year-old Navy ship USS Constellation and the World War Il submarine Torsfe, and seals frolic at the entrance to the National Aquarium.

But to Lt. Col. Bill Stevenson, there's a grim vision behind the bustling restaurants, crowded souvenir shops and prosperous office towers of this urban renaissance.

In Colonel Stevenson's mind's eye, the area is deserted. To the southeast, the harbor's cargo terminals lie obliterated by an enormous bomb blast. Or perhaps the cranes and warehouses are still intact but rendered lifeless by nuclear contamination.

"I worry most about a nuclear IED," Colonel Stevenson says, using the Iraq war term for improvised explosive device. "The devastation that would cause, the contamination, the complexity of that catastrophic event." Preparing for the unthinkable is Colonel Stevenson's job as commander of the Maryland National Guard's 32nd Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Team (CST).

The Pentagon certified the 32nd CST as ready for duty Sept. 20, bringing to 42 the number of certified CSTs (box, page 27) across the United States.

Eventually, at least 55 teams will cover each state, three U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. Congress has authorized that many thus far, with California the only state or territory with more than one.

(Florida and New York may soon join California with two teams, pushing the eventual total CSTs to 57. Lawmakers included funds in the fiscal 2007 defense appropriations act for a second team in Florida and New York. Their formal authorization is pending.)

The teams were designed to respond to attacks on the United States by chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, but their responsibilities continue to grow, evolve and sometimes are hard to pin down.

"One of the things that 9/11 taught us is nothing's beyond your imagination anymore," Colonel Stevenson says.

In 2001, for example, anthrax-laced letters mailed to Congress killed five postal workers and contaminated a postal sorting center in Brentwood, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.

And there's no shortage of other potential terrorist targets in Maryland, Colonel Stevenson says. There's Andrews Air Force Base on the edge of Washington, D.C., home to Air Force One and a hub for VIP travelers.

There are three massive professional sports stadiums. There's a nuclear power plant on Chesapeake Bay and an Army biological weapons lab at Fort Derrick, Md., north of Washington.

"Your imagination can run wild, there are so many scenarios," Colonel Stevenson says. "Maryland is sort of right in the middle of it," which puts the 32nd CST in the middle of it.

Across the country, a growing number of CSTs are in that position. Between 2001 and 2005, CSTs handled more than 400 incidents and assisted in more than 4,100.

They responded to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and to hundreds of incidents as minor as examining suspicious packages.

But increasing use has sparked debate about whether CSTs are called too often and for the wrong reasons.

Some CST commanders and state officials declined to deploy their teams to help recover space shuttle wreckage, contending that picking up shuttle pieces scattered across five states was not an appropriate mission, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in their May report, "National Guard Bureau Needs to Clanfy Civil Support Teams' Mission and Address Management Challenges."

But other CSTs did participate. The debate flared again after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Since the hurricane did not involve weapons of mass destruction or terrorism, some Guard officials questioned whether it was an appropriate mission for CSTs.

At least one state refused to let its CST participate, the GAO reported. But 18 other CSTs sent personnel and equipment to the battered Gulf Coast.

At the National Guard Bureau, Maj. James McGuyer, acting chief of the Standardization and Evaluations Branch, contends that responding to Hurricane Katrina was the right thing to do. For one thing, it gave the CSTs their most realistic experience so far.

The devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi was "very similar to the effect you will see if we have a WMD attack," Major McGuyer says.

There was a mass evacuation, hundreds of casualties and a threat of biological and chemical contamination. "At one point, CSTs had identified hazards at over 15,000 different hazardous sites," he adds.

The CSTs' emergency communication abilities proved critical in the hurricane zone.

"We were able to link CSTs to individual parishes in Louisiana. The CST would work directly with the sheriff, the parish president or whoever was in charge," Major McGuyer adds. Often, local authorities learned from CST members what help was available from state and federal agencies.

The CSTs' Katrina performance so impressed the White House that a February 2006 White House report on hurricane lessons learned recommended possibly expanding CST roles to cover manmade and natural disasters as well as terrorist attacks.