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Hurricane Exercise Prepares Virginia Government for the Worst

Disaster simulation brings military and local forces together for civilians in weather emergencies.

EM_Virginia_Hurricane_Exercise
Lt. Col. Bill Korsen, commander of the 2/183rd Cavalry, and his company commanders brief Col. Rob McMillin, director of operations for the Virginia Guard, on their plan for assisting with the Interstate 64 lane reversal plan. The Virginia Guard conducted a four-day hurricane response exercise in Virginia Beach from June 15-18, 2009. (Photo by Maj. Cotton Puryear, Virginia National Guard)
Photo by Maj. Cotton Puryear, Virginia National Guard
Photo: Lt. Col. Bill Korsen, commander of the 2/183rd Cavalry, and his company commanders brief Col. Rob McMillin, director of operations for the Virginia Guard, on their plan for assisting with the Interstate 64 lane reversal plan. The Virginia Guard conducted a four-day hurricane response exercise in Virginia Beach from June 15-18, 2009. (Photo by Maj. Cotton Puryear, Virginia National Guard)
 

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.

“We deliberately planned this to be of such a large scale that we would induce failure points among our staff,” said Col. Rob McMillin. “We wanted to cause our system to fail, identify those failure points and address those gaps in capability so that if we ever have a very large-scale event that we’re able to respond effectively.”

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.

The government used his company’s technology to make predictions and strategize.    

“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.

 

Hilton Collins is a former staff writer for Government Technology and Emergency Management magazines.
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