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Members of the Nebraska Army and Air National Guard had the opportunity to get a head start on the work they would be doing in support of three separate hurricane relief operations when they conducted a major, multi-state disaster response exercise just days before Hurricane Harvey struck Texas in late August.
Conducted at the Mead Training Site, the Aug. 25-28 exercise involved roughly 600 Soldiers and Airmen from the Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri National Guard as well as local and state emergency response officials.
The exercise was designed to test the Guard’s ability to respond to a domestic emergency involving an explosion and the possible release of hazardous chemicals that overwhelms local civilian first responders’ ability to support. The training involved such activities as search and extraction operations located within the “rubble pile” and a nearby abandoned concrete Atlas missile site as well as chemical decontamination and medical triage efforts in several nearby grassy pastures.
Among those participating in the exercise were members of the Nebraska National Guard’s CBRNE Enhanced Force Package (CERFP) element, the Missouri National Guard’s Homeland Response Force, Missouri Task Force 1 and staff members of the Nebraska National Guard’s Joint Operations Center in Lincoln.
According to Lt. Col. Bryan Medcalf, commander of both the Nebraska Army National Guard’s 126th Chemical Battalion and the Guard’s joint CERFP, the exercise provided his team of Soldiers and Airmen an opportunity to work with members of Missouri’s HRF, which would serve as his unit’s higher headquarters during an actual multi-state disaster response.
“This is the first time that we’ve actually trained together like this,” Medcalf said.
The Nebraska exercise involved a fictitious series of explosions resulting from a pipeline rupture at a local power plant facility that so overwhelms local and state first responders’ resources after several days that the Guard’s CERFP and HRF are required to provide support as part of their commitments to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Region 7.
Medcalf said even though the exercise was broader in scope than what the CERFP normally conducts, in many ways it was still similar to the missions they’ve worked on in the past.
“Finding the casualties, transporting them, deconning them, medical triage and then get them on their way to the hospital,” Medcalf said.
Medcalf said along with integrating the HRF into the exercise, the event also allowed members of the Guard to work with Missouri’s Task Force 1, a civilian team made up of experts in the areas of search and extraction. “Getting to have direct contact with members of the team has really been a good experience for our search and extraction folks,” he added.
Those Nebraskans who participated in the exercise said it was both a good refresher on their responsibilities as members of the CERFP, as well as eye-opening.
“It’s been good,” said Capt. Ryan Decker, a Nebraska Air National Guard flight doctor with the Lincoln-based 155th Medical Group, as he practiced triaging patients as they came out of the decontamination tents. “I have been to several of these exercises before. Today was definitely a crawl phase…. We are getting everyone re-hacked again to learn the process.”
“There’s a lot of new folks down the line, so everything takes a little longer and is a bit slower as well learn the whole process,” added Decker, who in civilian life is a family doctor in northwest Iowa. “It’s going well now… but there’s some kinks to work out.”
According to Medcalf, one of the values of exercises such as these is that it allows members of the variety of Army and Air Guard units and functional areas that make up the CERFP to gain valuable experiences that would be invaluable during a real world emergency. Nebraska Lt. Gov. Mike Foley who observed the training on Aug. 26 said considering the world around Nebraska, that experience could be crucial.
“It sobers you a bit to see just what could happen,” said Foley, who also serves as the Nebraska director of Homeland Security. “We all pick up our daily newspapers and read the news about these horrible things that happen all around the world. It seems so distant and so remote.”
“When you come out here, it brings a dose of reality to it., a ‘Hey, this could happen in Nebraska’ … and then you gain some comfort knowing that there are people preparing for it, who are thinking about it and strategizing about how would we deal with it?” he added.
The fact that most of the Guardsmen who were participating are traditional Guard Soldiers and Airmen like Decker with civilian jobs away from the military adds to the strength of the team, Medcalf said.
“I think that what you get from having Citizen Soldiers doing this is A, they’re tied to their community and, B, they all bring extra skills. You’ve got doctors practicing medicine, you’ve got all of these guys doing what they normally do and then coming here and bringing those experiences to improve our responses… it’s just excellent, excellent training,” he said.
Foley agreed. “What’s fascinating about these men and women is 70 to 80 percent of them have other careers in the real world. They have regular jobs and then on the weekends and as needed they give so much of themselves and their time to be prepared for that day that will hopefully never happen but to be prepared for when a disaster might strike.”
And for a significant amount of the Guardsmen – in particular the CERFP’s medical section – that disaster would prove to be sooner rather than later. Just a week after the exercise, 51 members of the CERFP’s medical team were mobilized and sent to Texas to aid in the Hurricane Harvey response mission.
According to Capt. Michael Mitchell, CERFP medical plans officer, the exercise gave the medical team a significant head start on the deployment.
“It really helped get us ready,” he said. “We were able to get a lot of good training in regards to working together and understanding various processes that really helped us when we went to Texas.”
| Date Taken: | 11.20.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 12.12.2017 15:41 |
| Story ID: | 258511 |
| Location: | LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 59 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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