NRNW Hosts Emergency Ops Incident Management Course

By Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class (AW) Maebel Tinoko, Navy Public Affairs Support Element West, Det. Northwest

SILVERDALE, Wash. (NNS) -- Commander, Navy Region Northwest hosted a Commander, Navy Installations Command (CNIC) Emergency Operations Center (EOC) Incident Management Team (IMT) course at Naval Base Kitsap (NBK) Bangor from July 13-16.

"I work for CNIC, and we have a team of people that travel around to different installations and regions and provide training and readiness support in the form of exercise support, class room instruction, observing exercises," said Tim McKenzie, assistant shore operations training group chief, from CNIC.

"This particular evolution is going to be for the EOC so we have the members that are going to staff the EOC for this class so that they can get some of the foundations and the principles of what and EOC needs to do to operate well and understand what it entails," continued McKenzie.

The class was comprised of fire, security, safety, emergency management and various other specialists assigned to the Navy's ashore EOCs. Each student learned how to properly serve as a member of an installation's EOC IMT during an emergency.

"This class benefits the Navy by enhancing readiness posture with respect to responding to emergencies, disasters, a threat or some type of evolution when you would need a staff to handle a lot of things happening at once," said McKenzie.

EOC IMT course lessons cover EOC team member roles and responsibilities, information management and communications. The course also consists of a number of practical application classroom exercises utilizing student working groups to apply the knowledge gained during lectures. For EOC exercises, students separate into common EOC functional groupings (operations, logistics and plans) and work a practical scenario of an on-base emergency where they are forced to realistically lead, brief, coordinate and plan.

Each day, classroom instruction is followed by an EOC exercise that gets progressively complex.

"There is a demand for this training, and it is great to have them here. It benefits our command and tightens our communication lines dealing with EOC," said Master-at-Arms 1st Class (SW/AW) Mark Alives, anti-terrorism training officer with NBK security. "This training prepares us for emergency situations and connects the different facets of each section and provides us the educational tools to be able to handle any situation."