FORT JACKSON, S.C. -- When school officials from Fort Jackson, Richland 1 and Richland 2 school districts and Shaw Air Force Base came together last week at C.C. Pinckney Elementary School, they did not discuss questions of academics or extracurricular school programs.
The emphasis of the four-day meeting instead centered around questions like, ‘‘If Fort Jackson gates were locked down, how would we reunite on-post parents with their children going to school off post?’’ or ‘‘If a hurricane caused severe devastation in the Midlands, how would we supply food to schools and daycare centers?”
The training, which emphasized emergency planning for schools, was initiated by R.J. Frazier, Fort Jackson’s all-hazards emergency manager with the Directorate of Emergency Services.
“(The participants) all bring their emergency operations plan in, and we tear it apart,” Frazier said. “We find areas where they feel they need help or areas where we see there are holes that need to be plugged. We help them rebuild their program while simultaneously educating them on what’s called the National Incident Management System.”
The National Incident Management System, or NIMS, facilitates communication and cooperation among numerous agencies in case of an emergency.
“NIMS really took off after 9/11. And what NIMS does is, it brings all your agencies together with the same language, and it helps to coordinate resources,” said Dawn Warehime, program manager with FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute Program in Emmitsburg, Md.
Frazier said that one of the advantages of NIMS is that it specifies emergency requirements in a common language.
“Let’s say the City of Columbia needs a bulldozer. Well, instead of just calling in and sending in a bulldozer, when using the NIMS system, it gives me specifics on what kind of a bulldozer,” Frazier said. “What we learned after 9/11 (was) we’re all not talking the same language. I might get a bulldozer, but it may not be the bulldozer that I expect.”
Warehime said that the training is typically offered for school district officials and this was the first time the course was offered as a partnership effort between military and public schools.
“That coordination is very important between the base and the surrounding community,” Warehime said. “That’s why planning is crucial. You have your everyday environment where, yes, there are many resources. But if something happens and it’s a community or wide-scale (event), you’re going to go through those resources. So, (whereas) normally you would have resources at your fingertips, you may not have that (during an emergency).”
Throughout the training course, which also included first responders from Fort Jackson and school law enforcement officers from off post, participants learned how to develop and synchronize plans for manmade and natural disasters.
“Some of the scenarios that we’ve designed, particularly for this training, we’ve focused on things that are, I guess you could say, systemic to this area (like) earthquakes, because we pretty much sit close to an earthquake fault coming from Charleston, (or) hurricanes,” Frazier said. “One of the scenarios used was a tornado. We also used a pandemic outbreak for one of our scenarios.”
Madge McNaboe, food program director with Fort Jackson’s Child, Youth and School Services, said the training exercise helped get to know counterparts from off post and to improve communication.
“It gave us a lot of opportunity to see the other agencies and meet some of the people who would be involved in ... our plans,” McNaboe said. “We have plans in place for most of these scenarios, but there are people with different expertise in different areas who we were able to interface with.”
Warehime offered an example of why that type of communication is important.
“If you have two facilities with schools (on post), normally they may use the other facility to evacuate to,” Warehime said. “However, if the incident affects a large area, if they don’t communicate, you will have each one evacuating to the other site. Well, that’s not going to work, because now you have an incident that’s affecting a wider range. So they have to not only look at the other school site, but perhaps at a non-school site to make sure that they have evacuation points.”
Frazier said he thinks the training has paid tenfold dividends in improving the emergency readiness of Fort Jackson schools and youth facilities and he hopes that other installations will follow suit.
“There’ll be many lessons learned from what we did here, and, hopefully, in some way, shape or form we’ll help the Army be a little bit better (prepared),” he said.
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