FORT DRUM, N.Y. (Aug. 20, 2015) -- More than two dozen 10th Mountain Division (LI) Soldiers lay injured by the railroad tracks on Fort Drum. A derailment caused one of the train cars to leak a toxic chemical onto the ground as a plume of smoke rose into the air.
Flashing lights from various emergency vehicles could be seen far away, but they weren't moving any closer. With Soldiers on the ground waiting for aid, several excruciating minutes passed before any assistance was forthcoming.
It's not the swift, heroic scene one might imagine, even in a large-scale exercise, but it is the standard operating procedure when hazardous materials are involved.
"You're not going to go charging into a hazmat situation," said Joe Plummer, Jefferson County Fire and Emergency Management director, during the mass casualty incident exercise Aug. 13 near Black River Gate. "A hazmat situation is a slow, methodical process."
Before casualties can be evacuated, the hazmat teams have to reconnoiter and determine whether the chemical is toxic or stable and if the area is safe for first responders.
Fort Drum personnel worked with the Jefferson County Fire and Emergency Management Hazmat team and Watertown City Fire Department at the incident site, and with Carthage Area Hospital and Samaritan Medical Center staff conducting their own decontamination and treatment procedures once the casualties were transported there.
"The hazmat response was a critical part of this exercise -- working with the Watertown hazmat team and making sure those two teams were focused on the exact same task and doing procedure the same way," said John Simard, Fort Drum antiterrorism officer. "The camaraderie and teamwork between those two teams was amazing, and they did a great job."
A safe distance away from the railroad tracks, visible through the barbed-wire fence, was the incident command post where a small team of fire and emergency personnel maintained on-the-scene command and control over the incident operations. Upwind from the chemical spill, this team was gathering information and coordinating the response of all the participating units.
Plummer said there would be numerous details to consider, such as the proximity of the incident to schools and housing areas, weather conditions and chemical compositions.
As Fort Drum Assistant Fire Chief Matt Woodward, the incident commander, said in the thick of the crisis: "Right now, we're just trying to save lives."
Simard said the mass casualty incident tested the installation's response to a hazmat incident and the synergy between Fort Drum and its community partners. In the three pillars of emergency management, after preparation and response comes recovery, and that is when consequence management takes effect. During hazmat incidents, this would include an environmental cleanup, traffic patterns interrupted, and people who are sheltered in place or at remote shelter locations.
"All of those are follow-on actions to bring the installation back to normalcy," said Terry Byard, Fort Drum's emergency management officer.
Family support
To that end, the Army Community Service staff activated its Family Assistance Center. Role-players were sent there to test the staff's ability to react to an influx of confused and concerned community members. Richard Stepanek, the Mobilization, Deployment and Soldier Stability Program manager, sat down with a Soldier who had just returned to post after his wife delivered their first baby at a nearby hospital. According to the script the private read from, they were told to go directly to Army Community Service.
"In this case, we were able to help this Family with short-term baby supplies from our Family Advocacy Program and provide temporary shelter and comfort until they were able to return home," Stepanek said. "In some cases we might not be able to provide everything that a Family may need or want, but we can help them get in touch with other outside agencies for support as well."
Although the Family was nowhere near the site of the chemical leak, a precautionary evacuation of Fort Drum housing was notionally established for the exercise, and Monti Gym served as the temporary shelter location.
Not knowing when or how many role-players they would encounter that day, ACS assisted seven Families displaced from their homes. The unknown is always hardest to plan for, Stepanek said, and it made for a good training event at ACS as the central point for support.
"I think overall it went well," Stepanek said. "We definitely met our objectives, but we also identified some areas in our standard operating procedures that need to be redefined. As with any crisis or emergency, training is crucial, and the need to adapt to different situations is important for all of our staff."
"The more we can practice our craft in these exercises, the better as a community we can respond," Byard said. "I know that's very simplistic to say but it's vitally important, because we all have other jobs that we do and other focuses in life, and then an incident like this happens and we have to drop what we're doing and know how to respond."
CPX and WebEOC
The installation's command teams conducted a command post exercise in May that served as a trainup for the full-scale exercise. Simard said it removes all of the on-the-ground personnel from the equation and concentrates on command and control responses at the commanders' level in a self-contained exercise.
"From the command post exercise that John put together, we stressed the emergency operations center perhaps right to its very core limit because they were the primary focus of that exercise," Byard said.
The CPX was also the first test of the new WebEOC system, a mission command / incident management program that promotes situational awareness by providing a real-time common operating picture. Byard said all of the installation directors and commanders, as well as community partners, can log into the system -- available on computer, laptop or smart phone -- and receive live updates on an incident. The system also serves as a resource management tool and a data repository.
"We wanted to exercise our ability to use that system, and because it is still very new, we're still trying to work out our concept of operations, how we are going to use it and what is beneficial and not within that system," Byard said. "We are always increasing our ability to provide the commander with a real good common operating picture of what's going on."
Preparedness is a continuous cycle. An annual exercise may be a one-day event on an installation, but it requires months of planning and subsequent review. After the smoke clears and the exercise stands down, the after action review will effectively produce lessons learned that will strengthen the synchronization among community partners.
"The after action review brings forward all of the issues -- whether they are the challenges encountered or the positives, they are all listed and each one is followed through until marked as complete," Simard said. "That includes updating plans, perhaps changing procedures or equipment purchases. We will follow through until every issue is complete."
"If we are doing our jobs well, as soon as we begin the planning for next year's exercise, we look at the AAR and make sure those areas that needed improvement are incorporated so we can validate the correction or adjustment we made," Byard said. "It's a continuous process of improvement to get better at what we do."
Simard and Byard have participated in installation exercises across the Army, and they noticed that some places didn't have particularly strong relations with community cohorts as they have experienced at Fort Drum.
"We have improved vastly our relationships with the local hospitals and first responders," Byard said. "We always invite them to participate in our exercise and, occasionally, when they're doing an exercise outside the realm of Fort Drum, we will be invited to help them plan and work it out. It has been a really collaborative relationship."
"We here at Fort Drum know all of our partners on a first-name basis; we know exactly who is coming to the fight and that is the relationship we like to have," Simard said.
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