Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Bomb squad and SWAT team members trained together at this farm north of New Rockford.
Vanessa Richter (center) with Sheriff Paul Lies (far left) and members of the Richter family gathered near the training site.
On Tuesday, Sept. 14, nearly 30 members of the Grand Forks Regional Bomb Squad and SWAT team descended on a farm just north of New Rockford.
For roughly five hours, the two teams worked together to tackle a mock hostage situation, part of their most recent training exercise.
"We were working on hostage rescue operations, so we used explosive breaching to enter the house and the SWAT team would clear it," explained Assistant Commander of the Grand Forks Regional Bomb Squad, Vanessa Richter. "We were just working on the motions of hostage rescue situations."
Richter, a native of New Rockford, has been on the bomb squad in Grand Forks for nearly seven years and is an eight-year veteran of the police force. As she explained, the SWAT team changes the situation it responds to for each training event, and they often require the bomb squad to assist in their breaches.
"This training was just for explosive breaching, so it wasn't our normal bomb squad training," explained Richter. "When we work with the SWAT team it's mostly just scenario-based and how we're going to go in, either explosively, or if we use our robots, because we run the robots for the team."
Both the Grand Forks Regional Bomb Squad and SWAT team conduct training exercises twice a month, keeping both teams prepped for any scenario that arises in their service area, which includes Eddy County.
Though rare, the Grand Forks Regional SWAT team has responded to hostage situations before. In April of 2020, a 31-year-old man took his girlfriend and another woman hostage, and responds to multiple calls of unused munitions found on private property, including as recently as last month. There's no telling what these elite teams will encounter next, making it all the more important for them to be prepared for anything.
"We have to train to remain fluid," said Richter. "If a real situation happens, all the kinks have to be worked out, and when a hostage situation comes, we have to be there immediately and go right in. We can't really wait and monkey around."
Should a real emergency ever occur in Eddy County, residents can be assured that their first responders are constantly training for any situation, even in our own backyards.
