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    15th CST training proficiency evaluation

    Survey team

    Photo By Nathan Rivard | U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Mason Lord (left), survey team chief, and Sgt. Josh Lacasse...... read more read more

    CAROLINA, PUERTO RICO

    02.09.2016

    Story by Staff Sgt. Nathan Rivard  

    172nd Public Affairs Detachment

    CAROLINA, Puerto Rico - Every 18 months Civil Support Teams must take part in a training proficiency evaluation to determine if they are mission capable.

    “The most important part to come out of that accreditation is for us to tell the governor of our respective state, wherever the CST is located, that we have a certain level of training and that were are judged to be highly proficient in bringing that resource to him for whatever is needed,” said Lt. Col. Randall Gates, commander, 15th Civil Support Team, Vermont National Guard.

    The TPE can be a nerve-racking task and measures the capabilities of units. The evaluation by itself is intensive, but the 15th CST added an additional tasking to test their unit. They were going to airlift the unit to their evaluation.

    To the best of their knowledge, no other CST unit has performed an airlift and then conducted their TPE. This gave the unit a reduced timeline for the evaluation and turned up the pressure.

    “The biggest thing for us was taking two separate tasks and kind of smashing them together,” said Staff Sgt. Mason Lord, survey team chief. “Air load is an evaluated task via the command and then to pair that with TPE, so we do a whole bunch of work in order to prep up for both things and then you take that air load section and once you’re done with that you still have TPE.”

    The air load task was the first mission to accomplish and the CST received some helped from the 158th Fighter Wing. The Wing is known for their F-16 fighter jets and doesn’t house airlift planes, but they worked months in advance to make sure the CST had a lift.

    U.S. Air Force Capt. Zachary Clark, installation deployment officer, 158th FW, and his team coordinated flights with the 164th Airlift Squadron in Tennessee and the 172nd Airlift Squadron in Mississippi to get the Vermont Guardsmen to Puerto Rico.

    Clark said there were difficulties because they do not have a full-time air transportation specialist, but they made contacts with other units to accomplish the mission. He also said it was the first time they loaded this equipment with the special guidelines they had to follow due to the size of the specialized CST equipment.

    “There’s some certifications that are required because of the size of the cargo is bigger than most air force cargo, so there’s specific guidelines to how it can be loaded, where it can be put on an aircraft, what type of chains and what type of stuff needs to be put into it, so again, the aircraft is loaded safely and can fly, so nothing breaks apart.”

    The departure airlift was successful and all members of the unit flew out on Sunday with return flights scheduled for Friday. To an outside source, this sounds like a weeklong vacation from the Vermont winter in a sunny location, but the unit knew better. The airlift was just the beginning of an intense week.

    “Our work tempo was go,” said Lord. “From the time we got off the plane to the time we got back on the plane. We didn’t do anything else, but our TPE evaluation and our air load, both exiting from the plane and prepping to get back on the plane on Friday. A six day turn around with a lane in the middle is an extremely tight timeline.”

    The commander knew this timeline was tight and he had to ensure they could accomplish the evaluation in those six days.

    “We actually went to the evaluators and said, ‘could we make a longer primary evaluation on Tuesday, make it a longer day and forgo a second evaluation,’” said Gates. “They were receptive to that, but they had some concerns. They were clear in telling us, that there wouldn’t be any second chance. We’re asking for the removal in the schedule of that second lane, we have to take whatever they assess on the first day.”

    This decision compressed the timeline of two training lanes into one extremely long day.

    “We put all of our eggs in one basket essentially and had a 21-hour duration event on that Tuesday,” said Gates. “It was a very long day. We got up at 4[am] and we got back to our hotels at about 1230 in the morning…it was a long day.”

    That long day was felt during the evaluation. There was a huge temperature change from Vermont to Puerto Rico and the team noticed it.

    “We’re going from 20 degrees or lower to 85 degrees, getting in Level A suits, putting on air packs and expecting to perform your job with a 50-60 degree temperature difference,” said Potvin.

    “When a team member is in their fully encapsulated suit, with their breathing apparatus, it still gets very very hot and that’s outside temperature and how hot it is,” said Gates. “It’s magnified inside that suit. That suit just holds heat. We have ways to keep them cool, but they only last for a short period of time, so that was the biggest challenge that we had.”

    While team members were monitored and leadership focused on the safety of it’s Soldiers and Airmen, the survey team knew it had a job to do.

    “For me, in the survey section we make our money downrange,” said Lord. “So when you are doing hour and twenty minute, hour and half, hour and forty minute entries on a SCBA bottle that is only designed to take people 45 minutes, I think that speaks a lot to my unit’s commitment to our physical fitness and how these guys perform under high-heat/high-stress environments.”

    Even in the heat, all members of the team had a job to do. Survey is only part of the evaluation.

    “We are looking for their 12 collective tasks,” said Karl Nagel, exercise specialist, Midwest Team, U.S. Army North. “The CST has 12 collective tasks. All the way from deploy a CST unit, to redeploy a CST unit, to survey operations.”

    Nagel said that each section has duties to fulfill; the analytical lab, medical section, operations section, and command element all have tasks to complete. Each section of the CST is specialized and each is evaluated throughout the event. With only 22 people in the unit, they needed to pull together for each tasking.


    “Teamwork. This team pulled it off,” said Potvin. “We got together when we needed to do a job. We got it done. When things needed to be done that were outside their job scope, they did it. When we had to be flexible, we were. When we had to make sure that we hit every piece of that evaluation with all the minutiae and all the different things going on, we pulled together and did it and we did it safely.”

    “There isn’t a guy on this team that I won’t bend over backwards to help at any time and being only 22 guys deep, I think that kind of resonates through the rest of the unit,” said Lord. “I like being part of a team that is willing to help regardless. All the way from the Lt. Col. loading stanchions and stuff for the air load to Sgt. Pasquale, who is our brand new guy and couldn’t operate downrange with us, but was just the guy that you could go to, to be like, ‘can you go grab this for me?,’ short notice and he would literally run from one point to another to get it for you. So that kind of gaps the spectrum on the attitude and how they perceive our mission and what they want to make successful.”

    Their ability to pull together led to success on this mission. This was one of the largest locations the unit has performed in. Their evaluation took place in the Roberto Clemente Stadium in Carolina, Puerto Rico.

    “I think the thing that surprised me the most was the size of the venue,” said Mason. “We’ve had some big venues, we’ve never had a 12,000 seat baseball arena to kind of sit back in the footprint and kind of say ‘phew, that’s a big operation’, so just the shear size of it was my biggest surprise. We’ve had big buildings on this scale, but nothing to that kind of grandiose plan.”

    The team was searching for toxins that hospitalized more than 10 people. They didn’t know what caused the injuries and the survey team would have to methodically check the stadium for sources. They are the eyes for the command as they search for suspicious objects.

    “We’re the guys [survey] that go down range and explain to the people sitting back at the footprint what we are seeing,” said Lord. “A lot of people would walk downrange to the site we went to and see a water cooler and think it was just a water cooler, but a water cooler with a water valve on the front seems odd to our guys because we are used to looking for that.”

    The water cooler had a metal valve instead of a normal plastic one. The survey team marked it for sampling and took photographs to analyze. After sampling, the bacterium that causes botulism was found as a contamination. The CDC reports botulism as a serious paralytic illness caused by a nerve toxin and common symptoms are double or blurred vision, slurred speech, and muscle weakness.

    Other areas were marked throughout their survey and sampled. Caesium-137 was also found in the stadium. According to the CDC, it is produced by nuclear fission and can be used to calibrate radiation-detection equipment as well as treat cancer through radiation therapy. However, exposure in large amounts can cause burns, acute radiation sickness, and even death.

    While all the elements are notional and the team members are not in any real chemical danger, they perform and follow procedure as if they were.

    “We set up a decontamination lane, we can’t move down range unless we have that set up at a minimum,” said Gates. “Then we structure our survey teams to go down, take a look around, record things and then set the conditions for further follow on sampling team. The sampling goes down and takes samples of the liquid, of the powder, of some sort of substance that needs to be analyzed and then we bring it back and we analyze it for a presumptive answer to tell the incident commander. We believe it’s this, but it needs to be further analyzed by another sophisticated laboratory.”

    Performing their evaluation by the book is what led to their ranking on the evaluation.

    “On the out brief, we were judged as fully mission capable and it was definitely worth all the effort that we put into it,” said Gates.

    “The team knocked out every task, fully trained, fully mission capable,” said Potvin. “We put those pieces together along with that airlift and I think the team knocked it out of the park, as expected.”

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 02.09.2016
    Date Posted: 02.09.2016 12:56
    Story ID: 188364
    Location: CAROLINA, PR

    Web Views: 241
    Downloads: 2

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