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Hundreds of concerns — all dealing with people’s lives — weigh heavy on the minds of U.S. Army Garrison Kaiserslautern’s leadership should disaster strike any of the 15 kasernes here.
Life-threatening concerns stretch the entire scope from rescuing and getting medical attention for those injured to preventing further tragedy and safeguarding the lives of hundreds of Soldiers, civilians and family members who work and live on these installations.
Quick and persistent response to these concerns rests with the garrison’s leadership and staff who run the Emergency Operations Center or Installation Operations Center during any type of crisis.
A seven-member team contracted by the Army Management Staff College facilitated a seminar March 8 and 9 to coach the garrison’s EOC staff members for their upcoming Installation Force Protection Exercise, or IFPEX, to be held June 16 and 17.
“Our job is to help the garrison staff to operate as an emergency operations center and work together as a team to respond to major crises and to plan and conduct recovery from those crises,” said Eric Rydbom, Team MPRI leader, who added that the team goes to all non-combat zone garrisons in Japan, Korea, the continental U.S., Hawaii, Alaska and Europe.
The seminar offered a forum to discuss and develop an overall, comprehensive all-hazards emergency management planning and response capability.
“No smoking guns (for the directorate of human resources), but the seminar bought up some interesting points about all the coordination among the different agencies,” said Don Gwinn, the garrison’s civilian misconduct officer who will be manning the EOC as the assistant to DHR director.
He added that he was able to provide input during the seminar on the importance of the feeder reports on personnel status during a crisis.
Mr. Gwinn said that DHR is one of the important members of the EOC as its role is personnel accountability, causality assistance and notification, and “anything else depending on the situation.”
This same team with an addition of an exercise developer will return for the garrison’s IFPEX in June.
“At the end of this seminar, the garrison commander will give us direction on what kind of scenario he wants to happen (during the IFPEX) and make the staff react to in an EOC environment,” said Mr. Rydbom, who added that developer will come up with more than 300 injects making each EOC staff member immediately decide how to respond and take action.
As part of the Installation Management Command’s leader development program, the IFPEX focuses on exercising the entire EOC staff instead of just the first responders, which is where the focus lies in many full-scale exercises, Mr. Rydbom said.
“Exercise is always important,” said Henry Kaaihue, the garrison’s Emergency Management officer. “Exercises help you to identify things that you need to put into your plan and validate the things you already have in your plan. That’s why we exercise.”
