Unique Texas facility prepares first responders for major catastrophes

College Station, Texas — Simulated train derailments, earthquakes and other emergencies can all be found in a 52-acre complex known as Disaster City in College Station, Texas, where elite rescue teams learn to save lives.

“There’s no replication of this kind of thing,” Stephen Bjune, Texas Task Force 1 training manager, told CBS News. “There’s smaller sites that have little bits of this, but nothing to my knowledge in the United States, or even the world, has this much disaster on this kind of scale.”

Texas Task Force 1 is one of 28 nationwide rapid-response Federal Emergency Management Agency search and rescue squads, and it uses Disaster City as its training ground.

Disaster City has more than a dozen disaster scenarios, each based on a…