Naval District Washington (NDW) hosted a workshop in preparation for the two-week natural disaster preparedness event, Hurricane Exercise/Citadel Gale 2018 (HURREX/CG 18), on the Washington Navy Yard, April 24.

HURREX/CG 18, is an annual training event conducted by Commander, Navy Installations Command and U.S. Fleet Forces Command, designed to prepare the Navy, Marine Corps and local forces to respond to weather threats to U.S. coastal regions. HURREX/CG18 is scheduled to be conducted from April 24-May 11. All Navy commands at Navy Region Mid-Atlantic, Navy Region Southeast and NDW will participate.

"We conducted this workshop to communicate to the installations what needs to be focused on throughout HURREX/CG," said Matthew Brown, NDW training and exercise director. "We brought in a number of Navy Preparedness Liaison officers to brief how we would be working with them and what the region and installations would be doing should a catastrophic storm strike the National Capital Region."

"This year there's also Ardent Sentry which is the overarching national level exercise, which HURREX/CG is only a part of," said Brown. "The next two weeks will be spent with the Navy focused on HURREX/CG, but all the other armed services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and civilian entities will be practicing exercise and disaster recovery."

Brown says recovery should be the region's primary role and responsibility in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

"There's two major missions we're trying to accomplish with the exercise: preparedness and recovery," said Brown. "Recovery is the phase of support that would be required afterwards. We typically have been very good at the front end and we haven't been focused on the back end, which is part of the reason we did this workshop. We're trying to get the minds of all of our installations and teammates focused on the recovery aspects after a storm would hit."

Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling's installation training officer Jeff Elwood has participated in training events like HURREX/CG since 2000 when he was still an active-duty Sailor. Over time, he's found communication to be an important element to success.

"One of the biggest things I've realized we could always do better is communicate," said Elwood. "Communication could be a fail point or a concern. We always try to improve our processes of communication to meet our command and control efforts. Communication is the key to making sure we get response in a timely manner."

The training scenarios used during HURREX/CG such as heavy flooding, HAZMAT spills, and power outages are designed to challenge those participating in the exercise to imagine worst case situations, how they would handle them and establish best practices for real-world scenarios.

"There have been a number of people who said the scenarios in this exercise are unrealistic, which I find interesting," said Brown. "There were similar statements made about it being unrealistic for two storms to strike simultaneously and Navy Region Southeast just dealt with three of them last year with Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico. It's a reality that we could be hit and because we're not hit as often as the southeast region is, I think it's hard to actually envision it actually happening. Our role and our job as the training staff is to make sure are prepared for the possibility of these disasters."


For more information, visit www.navy.mil, www.facebook.com/usnavy, or www.twitter.com/usnavy.

For more news from Naval District Washington, visit www.navy.mil/.