Photo By Sgt. 1st Class David Bruce | Spc. Ancharad Shoon, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with the 356th Quartermaster company,...... read more read more
EDINBURGH, Ind. — The difficulty with disaster relief is not really getting people and organizations to help. The difficulty is with management of personnel, efforts and material that pour into the affected areas. That’s the purpose of the Vibrant Response exercise, conducted by U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Army North, and held at Camp Atterbury Joint Maneuver Training Center and Muscatatuck Urban Training Center, both in southern Indiana, to test the ability of various military assets to render aid in the event of a catastrophe. Drawn into the Vibrant Response exercise this year, for the first time, is the Florida Army National Guard’s 356th Quartermaster Company, 146th Signal Battalion and 1218th Transportation Company.
According to Capt. Rebecca Gall, commander of the 146th Signal Battalion, the response to any disaster is in logistics.
“Once you arrive, it’s obviously logistics,” Gall said. “You’re trying to get all your equipment and your people here. We get on site, we assess the situation and we receive our missions. We then take small teams and push them out to forward locations, wherever will most benefit the local area and the units providing support to them.”
The 146th Signal Battalion’s mission is to support all of the units here to help civilians in case of an incident, said Gall, and providing satellite communications so responders can get computers and phones up and running and communicate around the city, she said.
“What we’re doing for this mission is a support mechanism,” she said. “We provide everything to sustain and execute the mission.”
“When something like this happens,” she said, “you don’t know what type of infrastructure has been destroyed. So, we call this ‘communications on the quick halt’. Basically, we can start wherever we’re located, and move ourselves to that location organically, meaning we can self-sustain ourselves, get ourselves there, put our equipment up and not need any outside resources such as power or anything of that nature from local infrastructure. We can get the job done on our own.”
The Vibrant Response exercise provides a degree of realism and uncertainty that challenges units involved to apply their expertise in creative and unexpected ways to accomplish the mission, said Gall.
“We’re taking what we know of communications and applying it to various arrays of different situations,” she said. “You have all the different units out there and they really just have to be very adaptable. You don’t know what you’re walking into when you get out there; you don’t know who you’re supporting or what they need necessarily. You have to arrive on site ready for anything. I think they have done a great job getting prepared mentally and with the equipment as well. That’s a fact of life when you respond to something like this that you don’t know what you’re walking into. You deal with it. You overcome and adapt and provide support for the people that really need it.”
“This is a great training site. There’s a lot space for us to be out here in support of Vibrant Response so we can get prepared should an incident like this occur. It has all the facilities we need,” said Gall.
Capt. Raymond L. Nagley, commander of the 1218th Transportation Company said coordinating efforts to provide support to the responders enable all the parties involved with relief efforts to accomplish their respective missions and goals.
“There are coordinating factors that come into play to make the mission successful,” said Nagely. “It’s good that we do these rehearsals now so we can make those connections with other agencies in order to make the mission a success in the event of a real-world event.”
Nagley credits the performance of his and the other Florida Army National Guard units on their history of disaster relief efforts within their home state.
“Florida has always been a leader in terms of hurricane support for civilian authorities,” he said. “It’s great to have our sister companies with us. We look at it not in terms as just the Florida Guard, but the whole National Guard and the citizens of the nation. So we were sent out here to be a team player with the rest of our counterparts.”
It was that experience with disasters and the realities of being in the National Guard in the 21st Century that led to the successful accomplishment of the missions.
“We are highly capable and an asset with in the Florida National Guard and the nation,” said Nagley. “We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from Army North,” he said. “The Army North observers said that fundamentals such as issuing Operations Orders that clearly defined intent, situation and execution of the 1228th Transportation Company’s missions contributed to their success. One thing about the U.S. Armed Forces is our training is as close as possible to reality. It’s one thing that we like to do and we take pride in.”
| Date Taken: | 08.16.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 08.16.2012 17:00 |
| Story ID: | 93358 |
| Location: | EDINBURGH, IN, US |
| Web Views: | 325 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Florida National Guard brings experience to Vibrant Response, by SFC David Bruce, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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