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ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Always ready to respond to hazardous materials and test interoperability between different agencies, members from the 10th Civil Support Team played a small but critical role in the annual Exercise Orca that took place May 17-21, 2021 in Anchorage, Alaska.
Hosted by the Alaska National Guard, “Orca” is a large regional exercise that brings together military and civilian agencies at the federal, state and local levels to test their response to a large-scale chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear disaster.
The 10th CST was one of 12 teams from across the nation that descended upon Alaska to help execute the multi-agency response. In the scenario, Alaska had reached its capacity to effectively respond to the incident and reached out to other CSTs and federal agencies for support.
Capt. Brady Plunkett, the team leader for 10th CST for the exercise, said they wanted to focus on building relationships so any future real-world events go as smoothly as possible.
“The CSTs are fairly flexible – it's a small community,” Plunkett said. “Having the relationships with your counterparts on other teams makes things more seamless so the real challenge is making a connection with the people that you don't work with often.”
Among the priorities of the 10th CST for this exercise were to connect with its higher echelon command and control entity, establish radio and internet capabilities and to focus on joint entry into an all-hazards area with its federal counterparts, the Radiological Assistance Program's Team 8.
During the exercise, the participating teams were faced with multiple problem sets. Some of those were identifying illicit substances, hazardous materials as well as responding to simulated attacks. The agencies then had to coordinate and communicate accurately in order to solve each scenario.
At home in Washington the 10th CST is the first line of defense when it comes to a CBRN event. The team gets dispatched to dozens of incidents in any given year. They've finely tuned their responses over the years. But working in concert with dozens of local, state and federal agencies in a complex, multi-location incident – that takes some finesse.
“Our team just does a phenomenal job having those relationships and training opportunities built up over the years so that when we come to events like this, we focus on execution rather than the training aspect,” Plunkett said.
| Date Taken: | 05.27.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 05.27.2021 14:32 |
| Story ID: | 397614 |
| Location: | ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 127 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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