Photo By Staff Sgt. Christopher Reel | An Anderson County first responders assess a victim from a simulated hard landing made...... read more read more
GREENVILLE, S.C. - South Carolina National Guard units worked with local emergency management agencies and first responders during a mass casualty exercise that covered both Greenville and Anderson, South Carolina, March 10, 2015, as part of Vigilant Guard S.C. 2015.
“Vigilant Guard is a national-level exercise. ... Predominately, it focuses on defense support to civil authorities,” said Maj. Seth Horrell, 228th Theater Tactical Signal Brigade project officer. “This here, in Greenville and Anderson County, is just a small cross section of the state’s exercise.”
As part of the Vigilant Guard exercise, a simulated hurricane scenario started in the lowcountry along the state’s coast, before it worked its way inland, generating tornado-like conditions in the western region of the state, including Greenville and Anderson counties.
As a result, Greenville County simulated that tornado-strength winds caused a building, the old Woodmont High School, to collapse, trapping victims inside the rubble. Greenville emergency management agencies worked to evacuate the casualties from the building, assigned degrees of urgency for the wounds sustained and then flew them to a medical facility by a CH-47 Chinook, which flew in from the South Carolina Army National Guard’s Army Aviation Support Facility in Greenville. The county used their National Guard counterpart’s air assets due to Greenville County Hospital and medical assets being simulated as overtaxed as a result of the storm.
As the exercise continued, the helicopter used to evacuate the casualties simulated a malfunction due to weather and performed an emergency landing at Anderson Regional Airport, where more injuries were sustained in the hard landing. In addition to carrying out a mass casualty emergency response, Anderson County emergency personnel had to also respond to a hazardous material scenario due to the large amounts of fuel a CH-47 Chinook carries. The causalities from that scenario were then medically evacuated by South Carolina National Guard UH-72 Lakotas and AnMed Health LifeFlight helicopters to AnMed Health Medical Center, testing its emergency room and staff in a high-stress mass casualty scenario, as well.
“It is not just the tactics, techniques and procedures that we focused on throughout this; it’s the relationship aspect of this exercise that is important to us here in South Carolina,” said Horrell. “At the command level they are concerned with making sure we are able to react to a regional disaster; however, in addition to that, we are concerned with establishing those relationships between our military organizations and the civil and medical authorities in such a way that when something does happen and the initial phone call goes out, they will know [the South Carolina National Guard] is there ready for their call.”
In a scenario like the one played out in Greenville and Anderson, it is also expected that land lines, cell towers and internet could be flooded with calls to 911 dispatchers or could be knocked off-line all together. In this instance, the 228th Theater Tactical Signal Brigade can assist with providing communication assets and aiding in the counties’ continuity of operations with an Incident Commander’s Command, Control and Communications Unit – a mobile communications trailer that can get the county back online with telephone, video and internet capabilities during an emergency.
“This exercise is a positive motivator to help relationships move forward,” said Bryan Tillirson, Anderson County Emergency Services coordinator, lead planner for this Vigilant Guard MASCAL exercise, as well as a major in the 263rd Army Air and Missile Defense Command. “When you make those relationships and maintain those relationships, the interoperability is the easy part. But, when you don’t have that networking and partnership and when one agency comes to another, you won’t have an operational skill set. Us practicing and working together with our military partnerships prepares us for any future potential need. When that time comes, we will already have that interoperability piece and be able to work seamlessly together.”
Recently, the upstate put that relationship to the test in a real-world situation. After Gov. Nikki Haley declared a state of emergency Feb. 25, 2015, as a result of impending hazardous weather, Greenville County civilian authorities called on their South Carolina Army National Guard partnership for the 228th TTSB to provide wrecker teams to stage along the highway to assist motorists during the predicted winter storm.
“You could tell right away that the interaction we had with these guys in preparation for this particular exercise allowed for things to go really well,” Horrell said. “We were able to communicate immediately, we knew exactly what we needed, they knew what they needed, and it was obvious that our interactions are already proving beneficial.”
In addition to building relationships and enhancing emergency response skills, there is more to be accomplished.
“One of things that we’ve been starting to uncover here at my level ... is that there are some things we can do to make our capabilities more applicable for our local civil authorities to be able to get it from us,” added Horrell. “I think our civil authorities are beginning to recognize that we are going to great lengths to make that capability available.”
Vigilant Guard S.C. was an eight-day field exercise held March 5-12, that took place at numerous locations across South Carolina and was used as a way for the National Guard and its local and federal partners to test their response readiness and capabilities to a simulated hurricane and the resulting situations.
| Date Taken: | 03.10.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 03.12.2015 15:05 |
| Story ID: | 156800 |
| Location: | GREENVILLE, SC, US |
| Web Views: | 118 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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