Spring Break
Military works on earthquake response after Midwest temblor
Woody Baird
Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: Campus News
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And though the five-day training exercise for National Guard troops from four states had been planned for months, it took on a fresh urgency following a 5.2 magnitude quake and a series of aftershocks that rattled nerves across the region on Friday and through the weekend.
The temblor, centered in southeastern Illinois, underscores the fact that earthquakes are "no-notice events," said Jim Bassham, director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.
"What we're doing here is to prepare for no notice because there'll be no notice," Bassham said as his agency joined in the training exercise centered at the National Guard armory at Millington, a small town north of Memphis.
More than 1,700 National Guard personnel from Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri were taking part in the exercise that began Saturday. The training scenario assumed that a huge earthquake - 7.6 magnitude - had hit at Memphis, which is about 50 miles from the New Madrid Fault, a series of cracks in the earth's surface believed capable of producing major temblors.
The Illinois quake, centered in a largely rural area, caused little damage, though it reportedly could be felt from Nebraska to Atlanta.
"The little rumble we had the other day - with an actual earthquake - I think set the tone for the exercise that we're all here to do today," said Lt. Gen. Craig McKinley, director of the Air National Guard, Arlington, Va.
For the exercise, the Air Guard flew in a small emergency field hospital packed up in modular units for rapid deployment and reassembly. Such hospitals, called Expeditionary Medical Support or EMEDS, can be staffed by the Guard or with medical personnel from the local area whose regular hospitals may be unusable.
"What they're doing in an area that's hardest hit is triage, trying to process as many people as they can and move those people to the hospitals that have not been damaged," McKinley said.
The training exercise focused largely on medical care, communications and rescue.
A 3,700-ton mound of broken concrete, twisted rebar, crushed cars and steel beams was piled near the Memphis Fire Department training academy to simulate a collapsed hospital.
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