Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Debralee Lutgen | Sgt. 1st Class George Johnson (left), recruiting center commander, from Cedar Brook,...... read more read more
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CEDAR BROOK, N.J. – It started with a question.
“Pretty much how this all started, it was a question,” said Sgt. 1st Class George Johnson. “Can something like this ever happen?”
After four months of planning, coordinating and sheer determination, the answer was yes.
Two Army recruiters, Johnson, recruiting center commander, from Cedar Brook, N.J., and Staff Sgt. Michael McGill, engagement team recruiter, from Long Beach, Miss., both with the Mid-Atlantic Recruiting Battalion, spearheaded efforts for a mass decontamination exercise to give local Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps high school students a field trip. When they started they had no idea the impact this one event would have.
It all started with McGill making his routine visits to the four local high schools’ JROTC. On one of these visits it was mentioned the students needed a field trip. Almost immediately he thought of a local unit, the 357th Chemical Company, and the possibility of a mass decontamination demonstration for the students.
McGill began visiting each school and asking for 50 confirmed students to conduct the event. After each school confirmed 50 each, he paid a visit to the 357th who jumped at the opportunity.
“I went to the chemical unit and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to do a field trip, I’d like to take all the kids out and show them what the Reserve do, two days a month, two weeks a year and show them the job … maybe we could do a mass decontamination’ and they were like, ‘That’s a great idea because we need to find some training, we just can’t find the people to do it,’” said McGill.
With the junior ROTCs and the chemical company on board, McGill thought he had a done deal. So he went to his boss, Johnson.
“He said, ‘It’s logistically impossible, we won’t be able to pull that off’” said McGill.
But logistics didn’t stop them from trying. After four months of planning, the idea had taken off.
“There were a lot of meetings,” said Johnson. “Every time we had a meeting with the 357th, more people started coming: (Drug Enforcement Administration), Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms showed interest, they couldn’t make it out here, but the DEA did. Office of emergency management, state, county and federal showed interest and started showing up to the meetings. In the fire departments it started spreading like wild-fire with interest in the 357th and enlistment and doing this drill.”
The recruiters worked out the logistics and had a plethora of interested parties. With all the interest, these parties began working together to get their own training value out of it.
“Everybody showed up to this big meeting. A lot of these people have never met each other and they’re going to work together in any type of emergency like this,” said McGill. “They’ve never officially met each other … We started talking about our capabilities and limitations at federal, state and local level and they started building a plan.”
Various agencies attended these meetings, but in the center of it all was the junior ROTC high school students and the 357th Chemical Co.
The company, augmented by members of the 411th and 320th Chemical Companies, set up operations at the Winslow Township Fire Station in Cedar Brook, N.J. to demonstrate their mass decontamination operations. One hundred junior ROTC students gathered to role play casualties for their field trip and to help make the experience more realistic. These high school students were given injuries, aliments and circumstances to act out during the exercise, including seizures, burning skin and missing family members.
The decontamination begins with local emergency services, including the fire department. After the fire department responds, the Army sets up their operations. In the decontamination operation, two tents are set up: one for ambulatory, mobile patients, and one for non-ambulatory, immobile patients.
If the patient is ambulatory, they enter the tent on their gender’s side, remove their clothing, are washed with a decontaminating agent, then rinsed. They are monitored to ensure the contamination has been minimized. Then the patient dresses and is monitored again.
On the non-ambulatory side, rollers are set up to slide a stretcher down the line. The patient goes through the same procedure, but is usually unconscious so their clothing is cut off and they are washed and rinsed by the Soldiers running decontamination. After they are through the tent, they are sent on to the hospital.
“It gives our Soldiers, who do those jobs, the opportunity to see we’re not just doing it to other Soldiers or the people who are paid to do this. We’re doing this to real human beings and seeing how they react to us … it’s not just running a whole bunch of individuals through an assembly line, it’s now dealing with issues that come along with that process,” said 1st Sgt. Roy Moweary, 357th Chemical Co. first sergeant. “So, it gives everybody an opportunity for some training. There were so many things that were accomplished here: an awareness from both the county and responders, Soldiers, some civilians were here watching what we were doing, we had many different levels getting an awareness of what we do.”
That awareness helped other participating agencies recognize the assets available to them.
“We were taught in 2006 that our federal resources came out of Fort Dix,” said Deputy Chief Michael Scardino, deputy fire chief, Winslow Township. “Here and now you know this capability exists, and you have the ability to liaison with people who are much, much closer and they can provide assets that we can’t, including expertise.”
Knowing the asset is there is important, but the firefighter leaders see value as this emphasizes the importance of training.
“For us, our firefighters learn. Hazard materials assignments are not routine emergencies for us, they’re very, very, very infrequent events, so training is perishable,” said Scardino. “So it heightens the awareness and it makes it a lot more relative when they see there’s an application for what they’ve learned.”
The firefighters weren’t the only ones using this exercise for practical application. Local agencies used the event to test their own systems.
“For the OEM and all the HAZMATs, this was a live drill for them also,” said Johnson. “The second they made the pager call … they were doing paperwork on this as if it was a real event because they want to see what their staff’s capabilities are, are they going to file the right paperwork, are they doing the right reports and all this is going to be used to assess future HAZMAT situations. So, in their eyes, this really happened today. They’re going to gauge their response times … They are rewriting books right now.”
While local agencies looked at training their staff, the Army Reserve took hold of a prime opportunity with this event to try to raise community awareness.
“Often when the military is thought of, they think about deployment, they think about the current campaigns going on, but they have no understanding or concept of a unit that is specifically there for a mission to help American citizens, save American lives, mitigate suffering and try to stop the bleeding if you will, stop the contamination,” said Moweary. “If you raise that awareness then number one, they’re not so afraid of us, the citizen Soldiers who maybe lives right down the street from them. But two, they may start to incorporate us into their plans.”
Moweary believes seeing capabilities and having a hands-on approach was beneficial to all parties involved.
“When you read something in a book it’s one thing, but when you see something in action and you talk to the person about what they’re doing, it gives you a completely different perspective on it,” he said.
Another goal of some of the agencies was recruitment. For the firefighters and military this is important because they are all volunteer forces.
“It’s also a recruiting opportunity for us. We’re looking for the same caliber and type of individual in the fire department that the military is … The same type of person who wants to join the military are the same type of people who serve in the fire department so it’s a recruiting opportunity for both of us,” said Scardino.
“The mission to this point was accomplished, we served a purpose with recruiting command as in raising our awareness and interaction with not only the local populace, but the local junior ROTC and they’re our future leaders,” said Moweary. “I think that was huge.”
While the goals for the hands-on portion of the event were a success, it wasn’t the only part of the exercise. The one-day event was expanded to three so leaders could discuss and solidify future plans.
Due to the success of the exercise, there is already talk of another. The mayor of Winslow Township, Barry M. Wright, has already begun discussing another event similar to this one with an entire high school. The participants of this event are receptive to the idea and think it’s a very real possibility.
“This was the beginning,” said McGill. “This is the first domino of a larger event, and we proved ourselves today that we’re capable of handling something this logistically complex.”
Some participants are convinced that logistical complexity will be worse for the next one, but it will be worth it.
“If there’s another event planned, there will be more agencies that play, there’s going to be more interaction and the more interaction, the more networking. Those relationships bear fruit,” said Scardino. “It just kind of snowballs and it snowballs in a good way.”
| Date Taken: | 05.16.2014 |
| Date Posted: | 05.21.2014 13:33 |
| Story ID: | 130653 |
| Location: | CEDAR BROOK, NJ, US |
| Hometown: | CEDAR BROOK, NJ, US |
| Hometown: | LONG BEACH, MS, US |
| Web Views: | 340 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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