EOD demonstrates capabilites

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Joshua Turner
  • 354th Fighter Wing Public Affairs
EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska --  The 354th Explosive Ordnance Disposal team demonstrated many of their capabilities during a work center tour for several Icemen.

The EOD team started the demonstration by showing a video of a deployment involving a multitude of explosions in sync with the beat of the music. The work center tour involved a brief description of the EOD mission and the different gadgets and equipment they use.

"We hosted this as a professional development seminar," said Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Guinn, 354th Civil Engineer Squadron NCO in charge of EOD training. "A lot of people don't know what EOD does, let alone that we actually exist in the Air Force."

Conducting a work center tour was a good way for the 354th EOD Flight to expose first-term Airmen to their mission.

"We try to spread the word of all our different mission sets." Guinn said.

"We don't only work while we're deployed, we support multiple home station missions as well. If Airmen are interested in cross training into EOD we want to help them out."

EOD has many different mission areas including conventional ordnance, aircraft, airfield recovery, improvised explosive devices, chemical and biological ordnance, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear ordnance, and bombing range clearance missions, all of which they train on to ensure they can respond to any threat.

"One month we'll do all aircraft training then the next month we'll do all nuclear training to make sure we're ready for a full spectrum of threat response," Guinn said.

The Airmen were given the opportunity to control an F6 robot through what looked like a simple obstacle course. However, when they were behind the monitor wirelessly connected to the robot, they quickly found out it's not as easy as it looks.
The robot wasn't the only obstacle course the Airmen went through. The Airmen put on an 80 pound EOD 9 bomb suit, raced back and forth in a parking lot and attempted to locate inert IEDs in and around a Humvee.

"Before, I thought they would use the robots to take care of explosives," said Airman 1st Class Devin Paulino, 354th Comptroller Squadron military pay technician. "But now I see that their lives are really at risk especially when they are unable to use technology, they're doing it to protect everybody else."

"The best part of the job is seeing tangible results," Guinn said. "In Afghanistan if I disarmed an IED that could potentially kill someone, that's taking away a weapon from the enemy and actually saving lives."

For more information, or if you are interested in cross training into EOD, contact TSgt Kenneth Guinn at 377-4207. If you would like to set up a work center tour for your shop, please contact Senior Airman Devan Downey at 377-9575.