Hawaii joint base trains for emergency preparedness

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Carolyn Herrick
  • Public Affairs
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii --  Twenty-eight members of the emergency operations center here participated in incident management team training, including earthquake and flood drill scenarios, Aug. 9 to 12.

This training, the first since the installation joint based, will ensure the IMT members know exactly what to do in case of emergency and was held in compliance with the Homeland Presidential Security Declaration 5, which dictates that all Federal agencies and entities that receive funding be compliant with certain procedures.

"The course has been a mixture of didactic lectures - giving them the basics - and then problem solving - working through the issues," said Dan Dubois, the emergency manager for JBPHH. "We're rotating people around into different jobs, and now they're seeing what it's like on the other side of the fence - what it's like to have to run the operations section and all the emergency support functions that come underneath operations."

EOC is a collateral duty for most of the people manning the EOC, said Tim McKenzie, Commander, Naval Installations Command training and readiness directorate deputy Shore Operations Training Group chief, who is here from Norfolk, Va. His mobile training team provides readiness training to Naval installations or joint bases worldwide.

"There are people from different units that get together and man the EOC," McKenzie said. These include people from medical, the chaplain's office, logistics subject matter experts, base operations, port operations, and various entities on the base that need to be in the emergency operations center during an emergency so that they can coordinate together and respond to either a man-made disaster or a natural disaster.

"We're taking people out of their comfort zones and putting them in different positions," Dubois said. "By doing that, if we have to stand up the EOC and we have the full complement of staff, anyone can step into anyone else's role."

The purpose is to take personnel that don't have the background of working in an EOC and, at the end of three and a half days, give them the ability to operate in the EOC and have a strong functional view across the board of the different roles and responsibilities in the EOC, according to Dubois.

The last actual event that triggered standing up the emergency operations center was the March tsunami in Japan, said Dubois, but they run exercises every quarter and stand up the EOC during presidential visits and national holidays, "just in case something bad happens."

"The benefit of this training is that when the real thing happens they'll have seen and practiced a simulated situation," McKenzie said. "They need to get experience practicing what they'd do in the event of an actual event or disaster. We trained them in the policies and procedures - both DOD civilian and national incident management system - for how to operate effectively as an EOC."

"(Now) we'll have a cadre of people who are trained to do EOC operations," Dubois said. "If - God forbid - there's a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, etc., operations go on for days and days, and you have to be able to sustain that."