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News

Team Buckley, City of Aurora train to respond

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Stephen Musal
  • 460th Space Wing Public Affairs
BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. --  97 members of Team Buckley volunteered to play the part of the injured and dying during a joint Buckley Air Force Base and City of Aurora All-Hazards Response Training exercise May 17-19 and 21.

"The AHRT exercise, which prepares the 460th Medical Group and first responder organizations, went very well," said Lt. Col. James Jablonski, 460th Medical Operations Squadron commander. "The comments from the trainers and local first-responder agencies were that the on-scene coordination should be the benchmark for the Air Force.

"I'd also like to thank all the base agencies that provided volunteers to be patients for this event," the colonel added. "By practicing like we play and minimizing the amount of simulation by using real people as patients we are better able to assess our response capabilities."

Emergency responders from the 460th MDG, 460th Security Forces Squadron and 460th Civil Engineer Squadron Fire Department, along with medical personnel from Aurora, responded to several events over the course of the week, culminating in a simulated blister agent attack at the Leadership Development Center May 21.

"The wing did a great job of command and control during the full-scale base exercise, due in part to our preparation for the recent Operational Readiness Inspection," said Lt. Col. George Petty, 460th CES commander, who headed Buckley's Emergency Operations Center during the May 21 event.

Exercises like this one help prepare Team Buckley, as well as the City of Aurora, by identifying problems so they can be fixed during training, rather than finding out about them in the midst of a real-world emergency.

"Had this been a real-world event," Colonel Jablonski concluded, "lives would have been saved."

 

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