The next time a hurricane strikes America’s eastern shores, there’s a good chance that Virginia’s emergency forces will be ready. They performed a unique four-day hurricane response exercise in June 2009 at the Camp Pendleton State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach. Both real and imagined “virtual” staff simulated a disaster that tested their resources to the limits.
The exercise ran from June 15 to 18 and involved about 500 personnel — from soldiers to airmen to members of the Virginia Defense Force — and thousands more notional, or imaginary, virtual personnel to test how they all would respond in a disastrous hurricane when communication and interoperability were essential. The government partnered with General Dynamics Information Technology, a communications network systems integrator, to get things going.
“If a Category 4 hurricane hit Virginia Beach, we looked at what potentially could flood, how much the water levels would go up, how much wind damage would be done and the flooded areas,” said Al Leonard, Commander's Operations and Training Assistant for General Dynamics.
“We actually put that on the computer screen. They could see where they could possibly go and where they couldn’t do, where they would need air support, where they would need bigger vehicles to go through the water,” he said.
The first two days of the exercise involved how the government would respond if Gov. Tim Kaine gave an evacuation order. According to McMillin, when this happens, guardsmen must assist the state police with lane evacuations and operating shelters. Communication was integral to the process.
“It would range all the way from a regular landline telephone to cell phone to military frequency radios to civilian band radios to air cards on computers through satellite and back, so we wanted to line up all those communications devices and make sure we could talk on one and could hear it across everything else,” McMillin said.
After day two, the simulation continued to put participants through their paces when the Virginia Department of Emergency Management asked the National Guard to provide everything from helicopters to engineering help to security for various tasks. These requests exhausted the guardsmen’s resources, so they in turn requested further help from other states.
“That lasted about a day and a half, and at the very end of the exercise, we started priming the pump for this year’s exercise by virtually staging several very low-end terrorist events,” McMillin said.
When he says “this year,” he means 2010. This past June’s exercise was the first in a line of disaster simulations Virginia plans to hold routinely. The 2009 exercise was the culmination of 10 months of planning before execution.
