Postwide exercise tests fort, local, state agencies

By Jeff Crawley, Fort Sill CannoneerAugust 20, 2015

RACH
1 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
RACH 2
2 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – Sgt. 1st Class David Williams, Maj. Doris Dualan and Steve Young look at where admitted patients can possibly be transferred as the Urgent Care Clinic is overwhelmed with an influx of "victims" Aug. 11, 2015, during the full-scale exercise. Williams ... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

FORT SILL, Okla. (Aug. 20, 2015) -- Fort Sill held a full-scale mass sickness exercise Aug. 11-13, that involved virtually every command, brigade and directorate, as well as numerous state, city and private organizations and agencies.

"It's a demonstration of our capabilities to ensure that if we had a foodborne illness outbreak, we could do the hospital component, we could do the epidemiological investigation, and we could do side sampling testing to determine the source of the outbreak," said Steve Gluck, exercise director. He is also the Directorate of Plants, Training, Mobilization and Security emergency manager, and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive specialist.

The Wilted Woes exercise began with patients showing up at Reynolds Army Community Hospital's (RACH) Urgent Care Clinic. Each complained of nausea, stomach pain or diarrhea.

The clinic received so many patients at once that the adjacent ambulance barn was turned into a triage center. Because of the number of sick people, RACH officials begin investigative procedures for some type of foodborne pathogen.

"They will exceed their capacity so they'll have to work with off-post partners -- medical emergency response center to divert patients to hospitals around the county," Gluck said.

At RACH, an incident command center was set up to manage the incident comprehensively so that the operation would work as a smooth, collective process.

Incident commander Maj. Jeff Diffenderfer, RACH chief of Preventive Medicine and Public Health emergency officer, said the exercise was realistic.

"It's a really good example of an outbreak that you might see in a community," Diffenderfer said.

He said he wanted the RACH medical and health care providers, Soldiers and support staff to know the steps to follow in such an emergency, and to be able to interact with the staffs from the numerous agencies that such an incident would involve.

Working with the county's Medical Emergency Response Center, RACH officials determined what local medical facilities had room to receive patients.

Although the "victims" were not actually transported to Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Southwestern Medical Center and the Fort Sill Indian Hospital, the patients were tracked as if they had been transferred.

In all, there were about 500 patients, some of them virtual, involved, Gluck said.

Oklahoma State Department of Health officials evaluated the exercise because they are the experts in this type of incident, Gluck said. They provided a number of graders and controllers.

At the incident command center, Cara Gluck, Oklahoma State Department of Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Service district coordinator, provided guidance, teaching, mentoring and assistance to the Public Health Command.

She said there was a big difference from a public health event, like foodborne illness, versus a disaster.

"At a disaster you have a scene, everything happens right there and you respond," said Cara Gluck, who is married to Steve Gluck. "With a biological incident, the scene per se, might have happened days or even weeks ago."

Days 2 and 3 of the exercise focused on environmental health specialists and food inspectors from the Public Health Command here finding the source creating the illness. It involved interviewing patients as well as taking samples from dining facilities.

"They will try to determine where they ate, what they ate, what they drank," Steve Gluck said. "They're trying to isolate the source."

The exercise was run by controllers at a simulation cell at the Great Plains Technology Center, said Jim Carney, DPTMS Plans and Exercise planner and lead controller and planner for Wilted Woes.

The cell's controllers fed timely exercise scenarios, called injects, to the exercise players. And, exercise controllers kept busy at the Fort Sill Emergency Operations Center passing information.

Carney said about nine months of planning went into the exercise that included updating response plans, and conducting a workshop, a seminar and a tabletop exercise -- all in preparation for the culminating full-scale exercise.

Overall, Wilted Woes went really well, Carney said. An after action review is Aug. 27. It will evaluate the installation's shortfalls and how those items can be improved, as well as the best practices the exercise revealed, Carney said.

"It's not entirely negative, but addresses what went well and what didn't go so well, and what we need to do to fix them," he said.

Fort Sill will start another large-scale exercise in September.