CAMP GRUBER, Okla. - Soldiers from the Virginia National Guard's Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, High Yield Explosive Enhanced Response Force Package, or CERFP, traveled to Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, recently to attend the CERFP Heavy Collapse Specialist Course, a course with nearly non-stop scenario-based exercises that required the Soldiers to breach, break, lift, haul, shore and crib their way through confined spaces and rubble piles.
"It's hard training, but we're learning a lot very fast," said Army Capt. Marianne Heldmann, a member of the Virginia Guard's CERFP and commander of the 189th Multi-Role Bridge Company.
The 96-hour course aims to give Soldiers a taste of working in a disaster situation and builds on the experiences and lessons learned by the Soldiers in earlier basic-level courses.
"It's 96 hours of solving problems," said Stephen Taylor, a Camp Gruber training coordinator.
The CERFP is a unique task force made up of elements from different Guard units and conducts tasks associated with incident management, urban search and rescue, mass causality decontamination, technical decontamination, medical triage and treatment and fatality search and recovery.
The course works to mimic a real disaster situation and Soldiers often work 18-hour shifts, completing missions at more than 40 sites at Camp Gruber that imitate a variety of disaster sites the CERFP could be called to respond to. Even the meals the Soldiers consume at the course are made to mimic what responders often find at disaster sites where local volunteers often provide the food, including pizza, hot dogs and chili pie.
According to Mike Shannon, who oversees the courses Soldiers go through, the goal of the course is to give Soldiers experience not just in disaster response, but also as leaders and decision-makers in high-stress situations outside of combat-based scenarios.
"In the Guard, you don't get the opportunity to make calls everyday like you do in the fire service," Shannon explained. "So the only way they're going to get the experiences and get the lessons learned of what to do and what not to do is to go and get some experience and this class gives you that."
Soldiers worked in squad-sized elements with course instructors, who had nearly 200 years of combined rescue experience at disaster sites including the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, serving as safety officers and observers. During the training, Soldiers rotated as squad leaders and incident managers, regardless of rank.
The course focused on five key components of search and extraction: breaching and breaking, lifting and hauling, ropes, confined space entry, and shoring. The course also stressed improvisation and creativity as key components to successful disaster response, and forced Soldiers to think outside of the box when coming up with solutions.
"It's awesome," Heldmann said of the course. "We've learned a whole new set of skills coming here and we can better help first responders and firefighters get victims out."
Shannon explained that disaster sites often lack close vehicle access and can require responders to haul their equipment for miles. This means responders have to improvise, using the items found in their environments to react to circumstances presented by the disaster.
For example, Shannon said in his own experience responding to tornados, scrap wood is often abundant, as are a variety of other tools and materials removed from garages and homes by the tornado, which can then be used to shore walls, thus aiding in safe entry to damaged dwellings. The course required Soldiers to improvise in this same way, having them haul themselves and their equipment to a mock tornado disaster site. Once there, the Soldiers used the materials and equipment they carried in, along with whatever materials they found on site, to react to a variety of different scenarios.
"One of the biggest lessons is that you have to make sure you use all the resources you can on site," said Heldmann. "Bring what you can, but you might not be able to bring a lot, especially in some of these places where you have to walk for miles to save victims, so being creative and using what you have on site is very important."
Because of that need for improvisation, there often is no single right answer and each squad must come up with its own method for completing the mission and rescuing victims.
Spc. Chance Waddle, a team leader assigned to the 189th Multi-Role Bridge Co. who attended the course, said he hoped to learn how to "mastermind plans," and gain the ability to look at a site and immediately know how to respond to it without having to waste precious minutes discussing the best course of action.
The course stressed that sort of quick decision-making, and Soldiers were timed as they worked through each scenario, which often encouraged them to spend less time talking and more time reacting.
"You have to learn how to make decisions when you're tired and you're exhausted and it's two o'clock in the morning and you're thirsty," Shannon said.