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    Creating a realistic training environment

    Operation Dark Horse

    Photo By 1st Lt. Brianne Roudebush | Paul Mahar, a medical specialist with Oakland Urban Search and Rescue California Task...... read more read more

    CAMP ROBERTS, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES

    11.16.2015

    Story by Sgt. Brianne Roudebush 

    California National Guard Primary   

    CAMP ROBERTS, Calif. – On top of a large, man-made rubble pile at the Combined Arms Collective Training Facility at Camp Roberts, Sgt. 1st Class Jarrad Negherbon carefully positions a mannequin into the pilot seat of a crashed helicopter. Negherbon, a team leader with the 235th Engineer Company, is setting up the site for the next day’s training exercise.

    The exercise, dubbed Operation Dark Horse, was a Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IX Homeland Response Force exercise designed to prepare the force for an evaluation in April.

    Negherbon said his goal was to create the most realistic scenarios possible. He recently completed the advanced search and extraction course at Camp Dawson in West Virginia.

    The course focused on different types of scenarios.

    “We learned to think outside the box and use different techniques [for search and extraction,]” he said. “We had to be creative and not always go with the Jaws of Life for every situation.”

    Negherbon brought those new skills to Operation Dark Horse. Rather than just placing mannequins on top of the rubble pile, he thought about where victims would actually be in a real-world disaster. He put the mannequins in cars, under huge slabs of cement and inside collapsed buildings.

    “I based the scenarios off what we’ve done in the past,” Negherbon said. “But I also wanted to create new scenarios [for the teams] and think about what they would encounter in real life.”

    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 11.16.2015
    Date Posted: 11.23.2015 18:46
    Story ID: 182662
    Location: CAMP ROBERTS, CALIFORNIA, US

    Web Views: 64
    Downloads: 0

    PUBLIC DOMAIN