On a blustery Friday afternoon at Camp Rilea, over 200 Army Reserve soldiers from across the country trained for a situation they hope never happens — a mass casualty event in the form of a 10-kiloton nuclear detonation in the Puget Sound area.
Jeff Taylor, of the United States Army North defense force, said the soldiers were simulating the aftermath of such an event in an effort to better prepare soldiers to serve affected communities.
Soldiers were divided into three units: an engineering company training to extricate victims from buildings and vehicles, chemical companies practicing decontamination procedures, and a medical company preparing to address injuries and illnesses.
“We’ve done Charlotte, North Carolina recently,” Taylor said. “We’ve done Philadelphia. We do this kind of stuff, this kind of training event, all over the country … Any time the soldiers can go virtually anywhere in the country and experience different challenges and conditions, it just enhances their training.
“So it may not relate directly to the specific community they’re training in — hopefully it never does, we never want to see something like this happen, ever, but you get an overall better trained force, better able to respond in case it does happen.”
For some of the participating soldiers, Friday was their first time training for such an event. Many of them were meeting one another for the first time, but since all three units must work together to be effective, communication is at least half the job.
Chemical Officer Emma Lerch is the commander of the chemical decontamination unit, made up of the 472nd Chemical Battalion and the 349th Chemical Company, both based in Washington.
“It’s all about the people for me,” she said. “So being able to be the commander of all these soldiers who are motivated. … They get to have this integration together for a really special mission.”
Lerch and her team were manning the mass casualty decontamination line to clear civilians of any radiation from a nuclear detonation. The line is made up of tents divided into two sections — one for those who are able to walk through and one for those who are incapacitated and need assistance.
There were also separate areas for men and women, as those who enter the decontamination tents must remove their clothes, which often absorb most of the radiation from a blast, before they shower.
Once civilians are decontaminated, they continue to the medical tents to be examined for any injuries.
Major Ocean Dunton is the officer in charge of the 456th Medical Company Area Support team, which flew in from New Hampshire.
A former member of an engineering battalion, Dunton found he was better suited to the medical unit due to his day-to-day occupation as a physician’s assistant.
“Our role is to provide medical care for casualties after they’ve been decontaminated,” he said. “So they go through the decontamination line and we receive them, we take care of any injuries that we can and then prepare them for transportation to a higher level of care.”
As a leader of one of the smaller units, Dunton has valued getting to see firsthand how his soldiers work together in a new environment far from their base.
“They’ve really acclimated, and I think they’re doing a fantastic job,” he said. “It’s a really strong group, great teamwork.”
Across Camp Rilea, maintaining a distance from the other units due to the risk of flying debris from vehicle extrications, the engineering unit set up shop. Clad in protective suits and masks, the engineers carefully pried apart an overturned car, supported with wooden beams, to recover the mannequins inside.
Sgt. Terry Speck oversees the 668th Engineer Company, which has flown from New York to take on the engineering unit role. This was his first mass casualty event training mission.
“I’ve been waiting almost 15 years now for something like this to come along and to make sure that, you know, I can grow my tool kit and develop more skills and more training,” he said. “It’s been wonderful so far.”
The engineering unit has its own small-scale versions of the chemical decontamination and medical tents, meant both for their own soldiers and for civilians in the event that the engineers are attending to casualties far from the main decontamination and medical stations.
“The scenarios that we deal with on a typical basis and the skills that we have are urban search and rescue techniques,” Speck said. “We’re doing things like confined space rescue, machine rescue, vehicle rescue. We do rope rescue — high angle, low angle. We do a combination of different rescue things to make sure that we’re saving lives.”
Speck and the other soldiers are in a unique position — not only does their Army Reserve status mean they often lead very different civilian lives at home, but that they must balance those lives with training for an event they hope will never occur.
“You have to find something within yourself that you can realize that and take that internally to give the maximum effort and the maximum care,” he said. “Because if something does happen, we’re the people that need to be relied on.
“So it’s hard, but you have to be able to put yourself in a different mindset, because everyday life is a whole lot different than thinking about the worst thing that could happen.”
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