Members of Texas A&M Task Force 1 prepare to rappel during the operational readiness exercise Saturday at Disaster City in College Station.
Stephen Whitaker
About 350 First Responders from around the country made their way to the Brazos Valley over the weekend to take part in an exercise at Texas A&M's Disaster City. It was part of a larger Operational Readiness Exercise that included the water of Lake Bryan and Lake Conroe to simulate the aftereffects of a hurricane. For this exercise, the fictional hurricane was a category four storm called Hurricane Jeff.
First Responders came from as far away as Utah and Tennessee, but most came from Texas A&M Task Force 1, Texas Task Force 2 and Texas A&M Task Force 3. Disaster City provided enough examples of collapsed or damaged buildings to give each team experience in close to real-life conditions.
"This is a full scale exercise that we do annually for Texas A&M Task Force 1, Texas A&M Task Force 2 and Texas A&M Task Force 3," Texas A&M Task Force 1 Director Jeff Saunders said. "Texas A&M Task Force 1 is one of 28 FEMA teams, so we have other teams from FEMA here from Utah and Tennessee to participate with us."
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Texas A&M Task Force 1 is capable of mobilizing by ground within four hours of activation and can be self-sufficient for the first 72 hours of an operation. Task Force 1 was founded in 1997 and has been deployed over 200 times. The task force can handle urban search and rescue, wide area search, water rescues, and helicopter rescues.
Disaster City is a 52-acre site in the larger Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) Brayton Fire Training Field near Easterwood Airport. Disaster City includes different areas for first responders to train at including derailed trains, car accidents, broken down busses and buildings with various collapsed roofs including a shopping center, a house and a parking garage. There is also a rubble pile next to the passenger train derailment that allows first responders to
Each building at Disaster City comes with panels that can be used by first responders to gain access to the building by cutting into the wall. It replicates the way first responders would gain access to buildings that had collapsed.
"Disaster City is really designed for collapsed structure rescue, and that's what's going on here," Saunders said. "An exercise like this brings the entire team together and in a real world scenario they practice all the things they learned in their individual trainings as a team and it all basically gets used just like we would be doing in a real world activation someplace in Texas or the United States."
The exercise this weekend began Friday and will continue Sunday with helicopter evacuations at the local lakes. The first responders will also use a local subdivision under construction to stand in for wind damage from a hurricane or other wind event because homes under construction are closer to what a home might look like after a wind event.
"When we do wide area search and that's when an area is devastated by a tornado or hurricane, mudslides ... whatever the cause where we basically go door to door," Saunders said. "A building that is going up and being built often looks like a building that has been destroyed by a tornado so we're using a couple of subdivisions that are being built in the College Station area as the inspiration behind building marking and telling how bad is bad."
The exercise will move to Florida next weekend as the fictional "Hurricane Jeff" moves from Texas to Florida.
On Saturday, a group from Task Force 2 was working on shoring up the wall where they had cut into the panel to replicate the search for a survivor buried under the collapsed pancake house.
"Since inception of the task force in 1997 the team has exercised in one way or another," Saunders said. "We started doing very large exercises in 2002 and at that time we were doing three exercises a year, one for each of the Texas A&M task force teams. We realized that was a lot. Instead of doing it that way, now we have a training plan that goes on for three years and all three of the teams get the same exercise each year."
Elsewhere at Disaster City members of the Utah Task Force 1 urban search and rescue team were training with their search and rescue dog on the rubble pile looking for "survivors." The dog ran all around the rubble pile and barked whenever a survivor was found -- just like a real-world situation
On Saturday, the survivors were volunteers and, in some cases, other first responders who signed up to be buried in rubble to be found. It was all to give every member of a team working in the area a chance to practice the way they might have to perform in the real world someday.
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