JOINT BASE CAPE COD – Editor’s note: If you listen to the scanner on a regular basis, you have probably been hearing some pretty gruesome reports such as reports of bodies piled up against the rocks and people needing to be “decontaminated”. Fortunately, it is just a large scale exercise as we learn in the following report:
From Brewster Fire Chief Robert Moran: Members of the Barnstable County Technical Rescue and Dive Teams are participating in Vigilant Guard 19-1, which is a full-scale civil-military training exercise, hosted by the Massachusetts National Guard with 46 federal, state, local and civilian organizations, November 5-9, 2018, held at various locations throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Technical Rescue Team was assigned to Joint Base Cape Cod and performed breaching and breaking, EMS and mass casualty exercises, and shoring operations at a simulated explosion and building collapse with a group of firefighters from the Boston metro area. 16 members of the Dive Team were deployed to northwest Massachusetts and are participating in a variety of swift water rescue exercises with other water rescue trained first responder resources.
Vigilant Guard is an exercise sponsored by US Northern Command that provides local, state, and federal agencies, National Guard units, and private sector partners to cooperatively work together under real-life scenarios to improve emergency response plans, inter-agency relationships, communication capabilities, field operations, and interoperability.
