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Members of the 7th Civil Support Command’s Incident Management Team participated in a two-day crisis management seminar recently conducted by subject-matter experts from the Army Management Staff College.
Long before the command activated in September 2009, the IMT had been boosting its number of personnel, building its knowledge-base and participating in various training events to become a self-sustaining initial responder to assess and manage a disaster or incident.
“This is a real-world mission with a lot of potential incidents that could happen throughout the world,” said Sgt. 1st Class John Mayle, the force development non-commissioned officer of the command, referring to the IMT’s role.
An IMT is defined by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a comprehensive resource (a team) to either augment ongoing operations through provision of infrastructure support, or when requested, transition to an incident management function to include all components/functions of a command and
general staff.
“We are basically on call,” Sergeant Mayle said. “It means we need to be ready to go with little lead time.”
The program was originally tailored for installation force protection, but they refined the seminar concept to assist the 7th CSC in its new role, said Reginald Barry, a facilitator from the Army Management Staff College.
“This is a new mission for us,” Mr. Barry said. “We had to reconstruct our course to execute this seminar to the 7th CSC and the commander’s training mission and needs.”
Mr. Barry said his staff wanted to get the 7th CSC to talk about how they do business.
“We were not here to tell them how to do business,” he said, “but for the staff members to listen to the other staff sections talk about how to do things and how to better understand the functionality of other staff sections.”
Joseph Kinzer, senior mentor of the Army Management Staff College, said this team has gone a long way to increasing its strength of 60 to more than 120 active Guard Reserve Soldiers in a span of a year.
Mr. Kinzer said some of the topics covered to help the IMT in planning for near future exercises and deployments included disaster response planning, operations center functions and standing operating procedures.
The IMT has been training its personnel in various aspects including the Incident Command System, individual key functions, the deployment process and field sanitation.
Prior to this seminar in late May, the IMT received training on the Battle Command Sustainment Support System.
It provides the ability for emergency management logisticians to access, scale and tailor logistics information in near-real time. The team is integrating the system as part of their Army Battle Command System.
The 7th CSC was activated in September 2009 as U.S. Army Europe’s premiere consequence management asset to respond to a crisis or incident in the U.S. European Command’s area of responsibility.
It has assessment capabilities of a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive event, civil affairs experts, and other command and control assets in the event it has to deploy in support of crisis management.
