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USCG, NMI agencies hold table top search and rescue exercise
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Posted on Jul 20 2011
The U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, U.S. Homeland Security, and several CNMI agencies had a discussion-based search and rescue training yesterday at the Pacific Islands Club’s Napu Room.
Thirty emergency responders participated in the one-day training, called Search and Rescue Table Top Exercise. The U.S. Coast Guard sponsored the training.
CNMI participants were from the Department of Public Safety’s Fire Division and Boating Safety Unit, Commonwealth Ports Authority, and Emergency Management Office.
U.S. Coast Guard Sector Guam search and rescue controller Leif Wigman-Nilsson said this type of training is extremely important in order to have a better coordination among different agencies.
If everybody is doing something different during a search and rescue operation, then all of them are just wasting their efforts, he said.
“When we coordinate and we all understand how each other work, then we will be able to have a more effective and efficient search and rescue,” he pointed out.
Wigman-Nilsson said they have been meeting in the past few months on different topics and yesterday’s exercise brought all that information together so they can do hands-on training.
“Right now everybody is plotting on a navigational chart. We will be plotting search patterns from the navigational chart,” he said.
After that, training participants would do search and rescue exercise where they would talk through a case or through a situation that involves each department’s role in the search and rescue. He said they’re going to have a basic scenario: a boater who hasn’t come home when he is supposed to.
“Everybody talks about the steps that they would take when the call comes in,” he said. “Who are you going to call, what are you going to deploy, are you going to send this boat out, are you going to send helicopter out? We want to see how it works, see how everybody responds to the situation that is put in front of them.”
