Read Full Article | View Source
CORDOVA, Alaska (KTUU) – From the East Coast to the Last Frontier, airmen from the Maine National Guard — often referred to as “MAINEiacs” — made the long journey up to Alaska last week to take part in the large-scale disaster response exercise put on by the state alongside the Alaska National Guard.
Two training exercises — known as Alaska EX to the state and Vigilant Guard to the military — tested the response protocols of varying entities in the face of a large natural disaster. The scenario was that a 9.2 earthquake struck Southcentral, triggering a series of aftershocks and tsunamis. Cordova was hit with a 15-foot wave.
And while the City of Cordova worked to establish an emergency communications center after evacuating its coastline, guardsmen from both Alaska and Maine deployed a Disaster Response Bed-Down Set (DRBS) at a camper park near the city’s center.
The kit is essentially a self-sufficient, fully independent camp for responders who answer the call to action after a disaster occurs. The system breaks down into transportable-sized cubes that can be flown into disaster-stricken areas. Once deployed, the camp has housing, sanitization, and feeding capabilities for response personnel. The idea is to not put an additional burden on a community in need.
Training on the Alaska National Guard’s DRBS was a perfect opportunity for the Maine guardsmen, as their unit is set to be issued one in the near future.
Maine Airman Carly Morrow jumped at the chance to participate after completing basic and technical training just one month prior.
“My sergeant called me and was like, ‘Do you want to go on a mission to Alaska?’ and I was like, ‘I’ll take any opportunities I can get,’” Morrow said. “I’m looking forward to learning as much as I can.”
Senior Master Sgt. Blake Varnell was one of the Alaska-based guardsmen who assisted with their training.
“We brought a seven-personnel crew with us to help train and help guide,” Varnell said. “This is their mission, their exercise, but as you can tell it’s all hands on deck trying to make sure we’ve got everything set up before it gets too dark.”
Dozens of Maine personnel alongside a handful of members from Alaska’s 176th Wing flew to Cordova via a C-17 Globemaster III, wasting no time loading the kit onto flatbed trailers for transport to Odiak Camper Park.
The scaled-down set included three housing tents, generators for electricity, HVAC systems, and an Expandable Single Pallet Expeditionary Kitchen (E-SPEK) — a piece of the DRBS that was a major point of interest for Master Sgt. Douglas Bishoff, who is the superintendent of services for the Maine Air National Guard.
“The E-SPEK is designed so you can take it anywhere in the world, drop it off, and cook within an hour,” Bishoff said. “You can have up to 400-500 meals if you’re serving [Unitized Group Rations].”
According to Bishoff the E-SPEK only takes four people to set up and is a rapid means of providing hot meals, whether to responders or displaced residents.
The collaborative effort between Alaska and Maine took all day to complete, working well after sunset in rainy conditions with temperatures hovering around freezing. After successfully troubleshooting an issue with the E-SPEK’s burners, the guardsmen shared a hot meal cooked in the mobile kitchen before retiring to their cots inside the housing tents.
The following morning, crews broke the kit back down in a fraction of the time it took to set up.
For Senior Master Sgt. Kenneth Brezovsky, it was likely his last training trip before he retires in 2025. Like Varnell, he’s part of the services team whose focus was on the E-SPEK but worked more with the civil engineers to allow the younger generation more hands-on opportunities with the mobile kitchen.
“With my services team I have a lot of young people, and I’m getting done next year so I tried to stay out of that to let them learn without my old knowledge in there,” Brezovsky said. “There’s a lot of new stuff going in the kitchen.”
Brezovsky said the guardsmen benefited from the training exercise and even had suggestions on improving the operation’s effectiveness going forward.
For what could be his last trip with the National Guard, Brezovsky was thrilled that his first time in Alaska was with his fellow guardsmen.
Copyright 2024 KTUU. All rights reserved.
