Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois – U.S. Army Garrison Rock Island Arsenal was recognized for the Black Start Exercise held in 2022 by Rachel Jacobson, Assistant Secretary of the United States Army Installations Energy and Energy and Environment and Brig. Gen. Kirk Dailey, Director of Operations, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-9 (Installations) recently.
The BSE conducted by Rock Island Arsenal in May 2022 resulted in an increase in resilience for the Arsenal and its tenant organizations, highlighting gaps in emergency communications, planning, and responsibilities between entities.
This exercise has improved Rock Island Arsenal’s resiliency to power outages. It allowed everyone to practice their power outage plans in a real outage and allowed them to identify which emergency systems were not working correctly. Most, if not all, tenants revised their emergency plans based on things they learned during the BSE. For the installation as a whole, it helped show the critical need for more emergency power in order to maintain the manufacturing capabilities and worldwide command of army logistics.
In conducting the exercise, RIA utilized a more complex outage/restoration plan to balance tenant concerns with BSE objectives. As a result, RIA and its tenants have improved their resiliency posture, incorporating lessons learned into their emergency response planning and communications, and addressing identified gaps in equipment and backup power configurations.
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