Against the backdrop of high-rise buildings and city skylines, a UH-60 Black Hawk MEDEVAC helicopter, adorned with its iconic red cross, navigates to a rooftop helipad at the Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, Calif.
Upon touchdown, aircrew members and critical care flight paramedics with the Army Reserve’s Golf Company, 7-158th General Support Aviation Battalion, offload a Soldier—bandaged and bloodied—from a litter to a rolling stretcher of the nearest medical personnel.
The blood is fake—but the training is real.
“Rooftop landings in a densely populated area with non-stop air traffic surrounding us can bring a different level of anxiety,” said Sgt. Nestor Pino, a Black Hawk crew chief and standardization instructor with G Co., also known as “SoCal Dustoff Guardians.” “But it brings great training experience and realism. It prepares crews for what to really expect when we deploy versus training on a military installation all the time.”
The Army Reserve Aviation Command unit, based out of Los Alamitos, has been conducting training with their civilian counterparts across Southern California the last few weeks. The training will continue throughout the year as they await orders to provide critical casualty care at Army installations with deployed organic aviation assets.
The opportunity to work with civilian medical units like Palomar Medical, Loma Linda University Medical Center, Pomono Valley Hospital Medical Center, and Desert Valley Hospital also allows for SoCal Dustoff to prepare for Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) operations. During this process, United States military assets and personnel can be utilized to assist in missions typically carried out by civil authorities.
While rare, military assets are requested to participate in DSCA operations when emergencies exceed a region’s capacity. In January, 7-158’s sister battalion, 1-158th Assault Helicopter Battalion, activated its Immediate Response Authority to provide aerial reconnaissance over areas surrounding Houston, Texas. Torrential rains triggered flash floods in the area, requiring coordination between the Texas Division of Emergency Management, Texas National Guard and several other government entities to search out areas with washed out bridges, flooded homes and floating cars.
7-158’s leadership wants to be prepared if they are called on in a similar situation.
“In these scenarios, our medical crews get a different type of trauma patient from what they see in the military,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Stephen Lacombe, a UH-60 Black Hawk pilot and one of the key planners for the training.
The MEDEVAC crews must be able to focus on everything from injuries sustained in car accidents, to flood victims and even decontamination efforts in the case of a hazardous spill, Lacombe added.
“Our crew members will go out and perform a rescue operation with a hoist at the point of injury,” he said. “And then our flight paramedics in the back will triage, treat and prep the patient for care at a higher level of care facility.
“That entails understanding differences between what we as the Army have as systems and equipment and what our civilian counterparts will use from different manufacturers.”
Since the majority of their personnel are Troop Program Unit (TPU) soldiers, which mean they have civilian careers and perform their military duties primarily on weekend drills and during two weeks of annual training, 7-158th relies heavily on their soldiers’ experiences as civilian firefighters and Emergency Medical Technicians. This helps them transfer patients when tubes are of different sizes and monitors perform different read-outs.
“It’s fitting a square peg in a round hole, basically,” Lacombe said.
When SoCal Dustoff’s leadership sought out partnerships by cold-calling local medical centers, Palomar was among the first to respond and see the potential for valuable training.
“It really came from the pandemic that we looked at this from a broader perspective,” said Marcos Fierro, District
Director for Facility Operations for Palomar Medical Center. “We’re a trauma center and we really own the largest square footage in San Diego, from Baja to Riverside and LA.”
As a result, Palomar received an influx of patients when COVID-19 overwhelmed urgent care facilities across their 2,200-square mile region. Fierro said that since the pandemic, they’ve been able to set up 30,000 square feet of shell floor to act as a Field Medical Station on upper floors. It’s a way to support MASCAL (mass casualty) events, which occur when the volume of patients or severity of injuries surpass what a medical system is designed to handle.
When transporting patients in those situations overwhelm the air medical capacities of Reach Air or Mercy Air, Palomar’s civilian contracted providers, or other military elements like the California Army National Guard, the Army Reserve can be called upon to assist.
So far, both Army Reserve and civilian personnel consider the cross-training to be a success.
“We know that in the military there’s different types of language they speak,” Fierro said. “It’s not a barrier, it’s just a translation.
“They’re super professional, you know what you’re getting when they arrive—they get straight to the point.”
As for Army Reservists like Pino and Lacombe, it’s been valuable flight training as well.
“We are encompassing high altitude, mountainous terrain, desert terrain and urban environments all in one mission,” Lacombe said. “We have degraded visual environments as well as austere environments for the medics in the back—dealing with the dust.
“In an urban environment, it’s busy; there’s not a lot of places to land and lots of obstacles.”
Palomar’s helipad is considered particularly tricky as ocean winds whip up to force aircraft to land from north to south on a pad 120 feet in the air. Still, it’s all part of the challenges that the Army Reserve accounts for when conducting tough, realistic training done safely.
“We’re getting the opportunity to see each side’s standard operating procedure and learning each other’s expectations,” Pino said. “Gaining that muscle memory in real-life missions has been very beneficial.”
For more information, contact Capt. Jeffrey Windmueller, ARAC Chief of Public Affairs at jeffrey.m.windmueller.mil@army.mil.
Follow the ARAC on Facebook and Instagram (@army_reserve_aviation_command)
| Date Taken: | 04.24.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 04.24.2024 11:12 |
| Story ID: | 469365 |
| Location: | FORT KNOX, KY, US |
| Hometown: | LOS ALAMITOS RESERVE CENTER AND AIR STATION, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 47 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, SoCal Dustoff teams up with local hospitals, by CPT Jeffrey Windmueller, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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