ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Civil affairs soldiers met with Anne Arundel County emergency preparedness staff members, Feb. 7, at the Henry L. Hein Public Service Building in Annapolis, Md., as part of an annual training exercise.
The exercise, conducted for a functional specialty cell from the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, tested the cell’s decision-making processes and its ability to develop estimates with Anne Arundel’s Office of Emergency Management.
The cell was put together to work on a scenario involving a train derailment at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
“We are using the Anne Arundel County emergency-action plan as the framework on how the civilian authorities would respond to that,” said Col. James Fikes, one of the exercise’s coordinators.
Information from that action plan can be used to help develop civil affairs decisions when teams are engaged in a variety of missions, he said
Using this civilian incident for training allowed team an opportunity to see how the military decision-making process can be applied to interagency efforts of this magnitude, Fikes said. One key factor in this process would be to figure out what the risks are to communities and people.
“In this scenario, we used risk analysis, as the obvious risks are to the public, environment and maybe property,” Fikes said. “Our primary objective here is for us to become staff officers [using] the formal military decision-making and planning process, but the additional objective is to learn more about civilian emergency response: how it’s organized and how it’s executed.”
The team met with key OEM staff members to discuss the measures the county takes in emergencies. The staff explained the actions the county takes during critical hours of emergency situations. One of the most recent examples the staff used in the discussion was planning during Hurricane Irene in 2011.