HILO, Hawaii—It’s 2 a.m. and the entire family is sleeping soundly in their beds. All of a sudden and with a piercing wail, sirens begin to sound. They know from past experience not to panic, but realize they need to know what is happening. They turn on the TV and see nothing but static. They try to call other family members on the island, but discover their cell phones aren’t working and their land lines are dead.
In the middle of night the massive hurricane they had been watching on the evening news had made a dramatic change in course and made landfall. The category 5 storm caused the seas to buckle up and form the largest tsunami the Hawaiian Islands had ever seen. Making matters worse, communications throughout the entire island chain were down. At least that was the training scenario that California National Guard troops were facing during a recent disaster response exercise in Hawaii.
Meaning ‘great winds’ in Hawaiian, the Makani Pahili training exercise had many moving parts, some of which involved California National Guardsmen deploying emergency communications to bridge communications between different agencies.
“In order to save lives we need to be able to get the communication up and running to coordinate with all of the other agencies working to get help to civilians of every community,” said Captain Michael Morabe, communication and information officer, 147th Combat Communication Squadron, California Air National Guard, San Diego.
Enter the Joint Incident Site Communications Capability, or JISCC. The JISCC provides a mobile communications setup that can facilitate emergency communications between the different types of devices used by first responders and other local, state and federal agencies. Deployed in each state by the National Guard Bureau, a JISCC is able to arrive at a disaster site and provide global communications within one hour.
The emergency communications effort at Makani Pahili came via the Hawaiian Civil Defense offices as well as JISCC teams from the California, Nevada and Alaska Army and Air National Guard.
The California State Military Reserve Forces operated the Incident Commander’s, Command, Control and Communications Unit, or IC4U, vehicles which allow mobility throughout the disaster area and are capable of communicating anywhere using satellite technology within the U.S. and the Pacific Islands.
The IC4U’s have the capacity to capture overhead aerial imagery either from cameras mounted on a vehicle or from those mounted onto aircraft and to transmit that video into the hands of emergency response teams.
At the Joint Operations Command, or JOC, California Air National Guard Tech. Sgt. Kyle “Gus” Murphy of the 149th Combat Communications Squadron out of North Highlands, Calif., established an initial communication system during Makani Pahili that included a wide-range of devices that could be worked with to bring downed communications up to speed quickly and efficiently.
“If it’s possible to run communications wirelessly, we can set it up from this JOC,” said Murphy. “With this technology we can set up different systems to allow them to become inter-operable and be able to permit emergency responders to talk to one another.”
Several different groups of local, federal and military responders use anything from push-to-talk radios to Blackberries to standard everyday cellular phones, said Murphy. Aligning the frequencies to allow them to talk to each other is a gigantic deed that the JISCC has practiced over and over to become very successful in quickly completing the task, Murphy further explained.
“It takes the complete effort of several different entities to bring up communications during a disaster,” said Lancaster, Calif., resident Maj. Jon Dahl, 147th CCS. “All of the separate state guard units and organizations collaborated together to work as one functional unit.”
“This training is real life-based,” said Chief Warrant Officer Christopher Moreland, Joint Force Headquarters, Nevada Army National Guard. “Any state can face this type of incident whether it’s a hurricane, fire or tornado.”
The threat of disaster is looming out there. It’s not if it happens, but when, and we need to train and be prepared to do battle with Mother Nature to save lives, said Murphy.
“We need to be readily available, reliable and responsive to deploy our assets at any time,” said Moreland. “Our first objective is to keep the citizens of the United States safe from harm, and that is what we’ve accomplished.”
| Date Taken: | 06.04.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 07.22.2011 18:45 |
| Story ID: | 74171 |
| Location: | HILO, HAWAII, US |
| Web Views: | 369 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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