CBRNE security

Radiation detection boat takes to water in Cape Cod

Standing at the helm, John Doherty let the twin 300 horsepower engines idle as the Barnstable County Sheriff's new vessel slipped past a sea wall being rebuilt at the mouth of Falmouth Harbor.

An alarm came to life. The familiar radioactivity hubcap symbol flashed yellow and red on a small screen as a computer-generated voice bleated "artificial radiation" over and over.

Doherty, a lieutenant in the Sheriff's department and a newly appointed captain of the 31-foot vessel, paid it no mind. The other captain, Shawn Pollard, a 20-year Coast Guard veteran, turned it down and explained that the new granite being used in the wall had enough radioactivity to trigger the mobile radiation detecting device they had set up in the bow.

The vessel came to the department thanks to a $445,964 grant from the Port Security Grant Program authorized by theFederal Emergency Management Agency in 2014. It is listed as a Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear and Explosives detection vessel, and it has the ability to discern extremely low levels of radiation that might be present in a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive capable of dispersing radioactive material over a wide area, potentially contaminating it for generations.