By John Edwards

As the Oakland Athletics played last summer between June 30 and July 8, fans in Oakland's McAfee Stadium knew they were watching their team struggle through a rough patch that would see their beloved A's drop seven out of 10 games. What they didn't know was that they—as well as all of the players and ballpark workers—were also participating in an elaborate homeland-security experiment.

Throughout that entire home stand, researchers from nearby Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., were scattered around the stadium, fiddling with strange gadgets the size of large tool chests. Their mission: to sniff and profile the rich ballpark air for signs of hazardous materials or substances that could confuse a chemical sensor into sounding a false alarm. "This was the opportunity for us to look at common benign chemicals and confirm that our system would not confuse them with toxic chemicals," says Ben Wu, a chemical engineer at Sandia, and the project's lead researcher. "Those tests cannot be duplicated in the laboratory."



With the war on terrorism now in its sixth year, public places such as sports stadiums, parks and shopping malls remain highly vulnerable to swift and potentially lethal chemical attacks. That's largely because accurate and reliable broad-spectrum detection systems are still a rarity. "Environmental chemical detection is an area that greatly concerns the government, businesses and the public, yet few deployable systems are available," says Greg Allmendinger, president of Harbor Research, a consulting and research company that covers security issues. "Everybody's still in the lab; there's not very much deployed."