Personnel from the 88th Logistics Readiness Squadron, 88th Operations Support Squadron, 88th Security Forces Squadron and 88th Air Base Wing supported the Australians’ arrival and unloading. After touching down, the Australian task force then traveled by land to the exercise site located at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Butlerville, Indiana.
The Australian task force joined 10 other urban search and rescue teams from Canada and around the United States, including Miami Valley’s own Urban Search and Rescue Ohio Task Force 1.
The operation is the largest civilian-based search and rescue ever undertaken in the United States, according to Phil Sinewe, spokesman for Ohio Task Force 1.
Ohio Task Force 1 is part of the National Urban Search and Rescue Response System, and its skills were most recently demonstrated in Montgomery County following the Memorial Day tornadoes that struck the local area. Urban search and rescue involves the location, extrication and initial medical stabilization of individuals trapped in confined spaces. Structural collapse is most often the cause for people being trapped, but individuals may also be trapped in transportation accidents, mines, and collapsed trenches.
Urban search and rescue is considered a “multi-hazard” discipline as it may be needed for a variety of emergencies or disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, storms, tornadoes, floods, dam failures and other natural or man-made disasters. The scenario for Shaken Fury 2019 is a simulated 7.7 magnitude earthquake in the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, which borders Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.
“This is a realistic search and rescue event involving multiple assets and operations, including team movement by ground and on rotary-wing aircraft, earthquake operations, including structural collapse rescue and wide area search, base of operations set up, helo-based sling-load training, and other task force operations in a 24-hour continuous operations exercise,” said Sinewe.
The exercise is designed to test, among other things, team abilities to operate in forward operating bases in an otherwise cutoff community, team abilities to engage in operations with foreign urban search and rescue teams, to test ability to live feed data from unmanned aircraft to search and rescue leadership, and to train on sling loading of US&R equipment to forward operating locations by Army helicopters.
Approximately 1,500 personnel were taking part in the exercise, including the Australian, Canadian and American search and rescue teams, as well as the Ohio-based Butler County Incident Management Team, active duty and Guard helicopter and unmanned aerial vehicle units, and personnel from U.S. Northern Command, the Civil Air Patrol and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Wright-Patterson’s portion of this exercise wraps up June 7 with the reloading of the RAAF C-17 and its departure for home.
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