PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii -- The 599th Transportation Brigade, headquartered at Wheeler Army Airfield, loaded out elements of the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade and the U.S. Marine Corps III Marine Expeditionary Force onto the USNS Maj. Stephen W. Pless here Jan. 5-6 in support of Pacific Pathways 2016 exercises.
To accomplish the move, the 599th got together with other transportation professionals from Fleet Logistics Center Pearl Harbor; Military Sealift Command; a Navy cargo handling battalion, a seven-person deployment and distribution team from its subordinate units, the 836th Transportation Battalion headquarters and Guam Detachment; and a representative from 837th Transportation Battalion headquartered at Busan, South Korea.
Before uploading cargo, the team first offloaded four Apache helicopters and supporting equipment coming from Joint Base Lewis McChord said Frank Viray, 599th traffic management specialist.
"We were able to offload the incoming cargo from JBLM without any problems," said Viray. "Everything we had to discharge was feasible and identifiable right at the ramps."
Ron Barrer, operations officer from the Guam detachment, oversaw loading the main deck.
"We haven't really had any problems with the move, but we did have to make a couple of adjustments because of height restrictions," Barrer said.
Viray said the area they had planned to stow UH-60 Black Hawks was not high enough, so the team moved the helicopters to another part of the ship.
Lt. Col. Joshua Vogel, 836th Transportation Battalion commander, led the DDMT.
"This is a unique opportunity to coordinate with brigades and battalions down to the stow plan," said Vogel. "We're working with a stow plan from JBLM; their plan let us move all over the ship."
"Our sister brigade's detachment had moved everything into a racetrack type of configuration, so we had access to all of the decks and could get into every hold without moving anything," Viray said.
"This was good because we had the height difference and needed to be able to get everything all the way down," he added.
Ray Turner is chief of terminal operations at the 837th Transportation Battalion.
"Ray is here because the ship will eventually wind up in Korea, and he needs to know what happened at earlier ports. Even though he was just sent here to observe, he spent the whole day supervising the weather deck loading for us. Every marine cargo specialist I know is like that," said Vogel.
"Working the weather deck, I am trying to get as much of the heavy equipment as possible up toward the bow to balance the weight and stabilize the ship for the trip across the Pacific," Turner said.
"We got a late start, but we haven't had anything unusual occur," he said. "This is the second leg of a four-stage iteration."
Because the ship was originally scheduled to arrive and begin the move early on Jan. 4, the DDMT arrived in Hawaii Jan. 2, said Sean Manning, 836th marine cargo specialist.
James Luxemburg, 836th information technology specialist, said that the Pless' one-day weather delay was a boon for cargo documentation.
"We had some problems when we were setting up our computer manifesting system; when we entered the file of the cargo list it made a system error. Without the data, we can't function with our scanners. So we had to go to our backups. We weren't able to load that until Monday. Luckily the ship came in late, so it didn't affect our mission," Luxemburg said.
A mechanical problem kept the team from finishing the port operations in one day.
"We finished the loadout on Jan. 6," said Viray. "As it happened, the gantry crane had a mechanical failure, so we weren't able to load nine containers until the next morning. We began again at 8 a.m., and finished in an hour. The ship sailed at 4 p.m."
"Overall the mission went pretty smoothly," said Scott Matthews, 599th deputy director of operations. "This operation was a great opportunity for us to practice expeditionary stow planning across multiple [Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command] echelons in support of the Army, Marine Corps, and the Pathways 16-1 exercises."
Social Sharing