FORT BELVOIR, Va. - Hurricane season is coming soon. And while individual households may prepare by stocking up on food, water and maybe a boat, more than 150 Guardmembers, civilians and active-duty servicemembers convened here yesterday to discuss a coordinated response should severe hurricanes make landfall this season.
The Rehearsal of Concept, or ROC, drill was organized by U.S. Army North, the Army component of the U.S. Northern Command, as part of its mission to support civil authorities during disaster. Officials from the National Guard Bureau, U.S. Coast Guard, Fleet Forces Command, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and many others were present to lay out their respective courses of action in the event of a hurricane.
In addition to the planning aspect of the drill, the ROC is also a chance for participants to meet each other before any hint of adverse weather hits the coast. The 2009 hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30.
"It gets people who are going to be working together face to face," said Air Force Col. Randolph Staudenraus, chief of current operations for National Guard Bureau. "You can say ‘I know this guy, I know he can help, I know he has this stuff here,’ in the time of crisis."
Interagency coordination is critical to success, he added.
"When you get everyone together like this, it allows you to synchronize your efforts because it’s like a machine in that you have a lot of moving parts; and, when you have that, it increases your potential risk of failure," said Army Lt. Col. Travis Grigg, deputy defense coordinating officer for Army North’s Region VI, which consists of Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana.
According to Army North officials, the exercise is designed to fully coordinate the support that active military forces could be asked to provide states and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the event of a major hurricane.
"With a ROC drill like this one of the main purposes is to coordinate your efforts and movements to make sure there are no holes or gaps so you are moving in a unified DoD effort," Grigg said.
Before Hurricane Katrina, disaster response was handled by the states through Emergency Management Assistance Compacts with very little coordination with the federal government, said Maj. Tom Puetz, an operations planner for the National Guard Bureau.
"Katrina changed our way of thinking," he said. "Since Katrina, we realized that we can’t do planning with just the National Guard anymore. There are some times when we need to rely on our (Department of Defense) friends."
The exercise scenario begins 120 hours before the landfall of a major hurricane and continues until at least 48 hours after landfall. This year’s notional storm hits southern Florida before gaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico and striking Alabama and Mississippi. The scenario is designed this way to provide a large number of agencies and states to present and run through their respective plans.
"By taking part in this forum, the state and federal partners have a better idea of when they may need support and who can provide that support," Puetz said.
In the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season, the United States was hit by 16 storms, eight of which were hurricanes. Five of those were considered major hurricanes, with Hurricane Ike being the strongest and making landfall just east of Galveston, Texas.
"Based on the things my boss learned here at the Department of the Army ROC drill, we took that and had our own Region VI ROC drill," Grigg said. "That is where we got down a little more at the tactical level with all of our players – our FEMA people, all of our state emergency management people, our National Guard folks and others, and we really honed in on that level with all those different players."
With Ike hitting Texas, Grigg said he witnessed, firsthand, the benefits of last year’s ROC drill in preparing the necessary agencies for the storm.
"It turns out that Ike followed along with the same scenario; so, when we had to execute we were ready," Grigg said. "Now, it wasn’t a perfect operation and we did have some issues we had to deal with while we were on the ground, but, had we not had the ROC drills, I think it would have been a much more difficult operation."
Note: Staff Sgt. Sean P. McCollum of the National Guard Bureau contributed to this article.