AEDC holds Great American Shakeout emergency response exercise

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  Recently, floods and tornadoes have dominated the news, impacting lives and destroying homes throughout a wide area, now, throw in an earthquake.

No, not the real thing, but a large-scale natural disaster exercise that included Arnold AFB.

AEDC conducted an earthquake exercise in conjunction with the National Level Exercise and Ardent Sentry 2011 during the week of May 16-20.

Think the prospect for an earthquake in the mid-South and Central U.S. sounds farfetched? According to geologists and other leading scientific experts, it is not a matter of if, but when a major earthquake will occur along the New Madrid fault centered in Missouri.

Daryl Justice, Aerospace Testing Alliance (ATA) emergency management lead, and Dan Johnson, ATA's installation exercise program officer, want people to know what to expect.

Johnson said one of the primary purposes of the exercise was to lead AEDC in taking on the role as an incident support base for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The multi-day format of the exercise allowed every tasked organization to conduct a comprehensive review of emergency plans and procedures.

"We want to know if they will work and if each tasked organization can meet their responsibilities," he said. "FEMA has evaluated Arnold Air Force Base as a federal asset and they want to use our runway area to stage emergency relief supplies.

"So, we will become a transportation hub for relief supplies that FEMA needs to get into the state. That's our major contribution to any recovery effort taking place in the heavily damaged earthquake zone in west Tennessee."

The other goal of the exercise is more immediate and that is to let people know what they will have to do to survive an earthquake.

"During a major accident, there's a hierarchy to a response - the government, then the neighborhood, then the family," Justice explained. "Well, during a natural disaster, it's just the opposite - it's the family, the neighborhood and then the government. The first responders may not be able to get there because they will probably be task saturated due to the wide-spread damage and not have enough resources to meet every number one priority. People need to be ready and prepared to rely on themselves for the initial critical hours or even days."

Johnson and Justice said the most critical actions to take during an earthquake are "drop, cover and hold on."

FEMA guidelines advise people, whether at home, work or anywhere else, to drop down to the floor, take cover by getting under a sturdy table or other piece of furniture and hold on until the shaking stops.

"After the earthquake [stops], as soon as it's safe and you get an all clear, then people should begin the recovery process," Johnson said. "The recovery process starts with taking care of injured personnel and then conducting a damage assessment of your facility, whether it's your home or whether it's your work facility, inside and out."

Regarding the New Madrid Seismic Zone, Justice said, "All the professionals think that there will be a catastrophic disaster along that fault line sometime in the future. About every 200 years there's a really intense earthquake, so they think we're due."

He added that the damage would be significant, a kind of "ripple effect" as electric, gas and water lines, highways and rail lines are destroyed or disrupted, bringing shortages in everything from gasoline to food and water.

"Even when Katrina occurred, oil coming out of the Gulf through those pipelines, was curtailed which impacted a lot of the United States," he said. "Additionally, experts say we can expect rolling electrical power outages for days and weeks.

"A lot of the buildings, unless they were built just in the past few years, are not built to seismic code. So, they anticipate that there will be a lot of structural damage, or buildings totally destroyed. There may be as many as 200,000 or 300,000 people homeless, just in Tennessee."