As part of the ongoing coverage of Exercise Coastal Response, Ha-Shilth-Sa was invited to cover the arrival of the elite Vancouver-based Heavy Urban Search and Rescue (HUSAR) team.
According to the exercise scenario, a Magnitude 9 earthquake struck at 7:45 am Tuesday, followed almost immediately by a 20-metre tsunami.
The squad set up its base of operations on Tuesday morning at the Fall Fair Grounds. HUSAR Training Officer Kirk Heaven pointed out that, in the event of a genuine earthquake/tsunami emergency, his unit would likely not arrive for two or three days.
When Ha-Shilth-Sa visited at 9 a.m., a number of HUSAR members were setting up the base of operations while waiting for the heavy units to arrive.
“I made the callout at 8 p.m. last night, and they assembled at 1 a.m. (Wednesday, June 8). This is our advance party. They came over on the [Coast Guard] hovercraft from Sea Island. The other team is coming on the ferry,” Heaven said.
While HUSAR assembled, a wide variety of partner agencies ranging from Emergency Social Services to Communications set up similar bases between the Multiplex and the North Island College campus.
In a previous meeting last week, Heaven emphasized that specific details of the exercise would be withheld from participants until the very last moment. In order to keep the exercise as realistic as possible, only key people would be aware of the actual sequence of events in advance.
“My team knows nothing about this exercise,” he said. “The only thing they know is the date they’re coming. Other than that, they haven’t a clue what’s going on. Everything we’re building, everything they’re doing, they have no clue. We want to maximize the challenges that we’re going to give to them.”
The City of Port Alberni and Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District have been training personnel for the past year, and are fully in the loop as far as the scenario and how the exercise will unfold, he explained.
Part of the exercise includes providing mass care and mass feeding of those injured and displaced by the quake and tsunami.
“They’re really ramping it up. Instantly, what happens in a small community is, you get overwhelmed as soon as it happens. And the resources do take time to come in.”
Besides training for disasters, the federal government has a mandate to deploy its HUSAR teams to other provinces or even to other countries when called on.
Heaven’s team was deployed to a massive landslide that took place in Oso, in Washington State, in March 2014. Thirty-six people died, and most of the effort involved slogging through mud searching for victims.
Most recently, the unit spent six days in Fort McMurray during the worst of the wildfire emergency.
“We went in there and the town was abandoned. It’s just mind-boggling that nobody was killed by the forest fires.”
Lisa Gallic serves as the Tseshaht First Nation liaison with Operation Coastal Response.
“I am working with Lisa. One of the scenarios is that she is going to call in a specific emergency,” Heaven said.
Details of that emergency remain confidential. However, as part of the exercise, HUSAR will deploy emergency equipment to remedy the situation.
Tseshaht has also made the disused Sproat Lake School available as a disaster site.
Heaven said his unit is divided into two teams working alternating 12-hour shifts.
“Both teams will be going out to the Sproat Lake School to do a recce [reconnaissance] to see if there are any problems, anyone hurt, etc. We’ll take the dogs out there to look for victims.”
While HUSAR won’t perform any demolition in the name of realism, the team may add some modifications to the facilities, in order to improve the exercise, or, in one instance, to improve safety.
“We could have patients in there. It’s all time-sensitive,” Heaven said.
In short, as in a real-life disaster, the exercise will be to move in quickly, assess damage and determine whether the site has the potential to be used as a relief centre by follow-on agencies. But for HUSAR, the main priority is to save lives, Heaven noted.
“In the real world, if we went in and nobody was in there, we would put all the markings on the door about what we found, and we wouldn’t come back.”
On Tuesday morning, as HUSAR set up, the “surprises,” real or virtual, were already unfolding.
“We were originally going to set up down at Catalyst. But a second tsunami came in and it was uninhabitable at this time, so we came up here.”
Well, it didn’t really happen that way, Heaven said.
“That’s an ‘inject,’” he explained. The term refers to last-minute modifications to the scenario that are thrown in by organizers to challenge the resiliency of the team.
“We never plan to move a second time,” Heaven said. “We should be safe up here. We came to the higher ground. You never want to set up your operations more than once, because it’s so demanding on time and staffing to do it.”
The first big HUSAR truck to arrive carried a front-end loader, a critical tool when you bring in a smorgasbord of heavy equipment.
“We’ve brought everything here with us. You’ll see all the shelters, the showers will be set up, the water [treatment] facilities will be set up. We’ll be doing water filtration. We’ll bring water in and filter it so we can drink it and shower in it,” he said.
A dog team, consisting of five working tracking dogs and one juvenile trainee (it’s an experiment in progress) is an integral part of the unit. One doctor arrived with the advance party, with more expected, along with a team of engineers.
“We’re basically a small city,” Heaven said.
One point Heaven and other organizers have emphasized is that, other than bringing in their own specialized equipment, all participating agencies are purchasing their supplies and services locally. As if to emphasize that point, a flat-deck loaded with port-a-potties from Alberni Septic Tank Service arrived ahead of the HUSAR heavy units, followed by the mobile unit from the Galloping Gourmet Catering Company.
“It’s going to be a wild ride,” noted caterer Shelley Fraser as she hauled supplies in to the kitchen.
As part of the exercise, ADSS teacher Dan Mott and youth support worker April McLean brought three young Nuu-chah-nulth students from the Step Up Program. Their job was to zap-strap pictures of “missing loved ones” to the temporary fence set up around the HUSAR site, as would be expected in the aftermath of a disaster.
