KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany -- The screams were faint and intermittent at first.
In fact, they were barely audible amid the coordinated chaos of emergency services responders evacuating and treating injured personnel, securing the site, marking unexploded ordnance, and directing high-pressure streams of water over the smoking remnants of a munitions storage container.
However, the intensifying cries of "Help me! Get me out of here!" interspersed with violent choking and coughing, and accompanied by the sounds of banging on metal, made it clear to firefighters that someone was trapped inside the container.
Miesau Army Depot firefighters Dirk Jung and Frank Klar cautiously approached the closed trailer, thick plumes of white smoke still rising from its top and sides. As Jung kept the fire hose ready, Klar stood to the side and swung the door open.
It was nearly impossible to see inside the smoke-filled compartment, but Klar entered to rescue the casualty and quickly found the source of the panicked screams. He hit the stop button on the CD player. Silence. Victim saved, exercise over.
The scenario was part of "Operation Thunderstorm" -- a no-notice, munitions incident exercise at a storage bunker area on Miesau, March 16, that tested the response capabilities of the installation's firefighters and military police.
"The response teams did quite a good job," said U.S. Army Garrison Rheinland-Pfalz Assistant Chief of Fire Training, Thomas Rothmann. "They identified the problem in a timely manner. They (neutralized) the hazards and rescued the injured. Training like this is important because we don't have a lot of real opportunities, fortunately, because of our strong safety and prevention programs. We need to practice to be prepared and identify areas where we can improve."
"What I saw was very impressive," added Marshall Fiedler, the new fire chief for the USAG Rheinland-Pfalz Directorate of Emergency Services (DES). "There was a lot of good hustle and smartly sizing up the situation. They executed the suppression by lobbing the water over the area because you don't want to go direct on munitions as they might detonate. They knew what to do when dealing with specialized response for specific hazards."
Those hazards involved strewn munitions and personnel injuries as the result of a simulated explosion during a forklift operation in which a pallet of ammunition tips over.
"We want to ensure that the worst thing never happens," said Lt. Col. George Brown, the garrison's DES director. "But accidents occur, so we want to make sure we properly communicate the incident, have the proper response time and get there with the right personnel and equipment to handle the situation."
Brown said the garrison, which has the largest emergency services organization in the Department of Defense with more than 1,000 employees and six full-time fire departments, has training exercises once a week within the garrison footprint as each fire station conducts response training about once a month.
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