Alaska Shield 2014

In Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, buildings collapse. Streets and homes slip into the earth.

Fires break out all over the stricken area. Oil tanks explode, sending flames shooting into the sky.

The supply chain that we rely on for having our fresh foods is very fragile. An earthquake easily could disrupt air travel, sea travel, highway travel, and so our awareness of what we need to do together as a statewide community is what we're practicing in this exercise.

Exercise has now started. We just experienced a 9-point— what? 2. 2, Earthquake, and the phones are going to start ringing. So welcome to the exercise.

See y'all on the other side.

We've got to find out what the damage is at the schools. We've got to find out what bridges, what communications. We got to find out the assessment of what's going on out there.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] State of Alaska organization, we have the Amateur Radio Emergency Services, which has statewide representatives called emergency coordinators all over the state. This particular case, we have the Matsu— and the Matanuska Amateur Radio Association, or called MARA, has gone just— they've just worked very hard to put together this communications van, and they add quite a bit of capability for getting traffic in and out of Alaska and around Alaska when other communication modes fail. I'm Rachel Richardson, the lead PIO for today. Thank you for joining us. My name is John Moosey, borough manager.

As mayor, I have requested the National Guard. Good afternoon, I'm Matthew Beck, a member of the Matsu Borough Assembly. My name is George Hayes. I was the incident commander for the first shift I have a few preliminary numbers to pass on to you folks. My name is Gene Stone.

I'm the assistant superintendent for the Mat-Su Borough School District. My name is Dan Gough. I'm the public information officer for Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. Good afternoon. My name is Vern Rupright.

I'm the mayor of the city of Wasilla, Alaska. Hello everyone. I'm Delena Johnson. I'm mayor for the city of Palmer. And I know that my job as lieutenant governor is to show leadership is there, is to support our first responders.

Is to make sure that people know that we will do everything we can to get the kind of help we need. Ah, thank you, sir. Good deal.

We actually— so we have the AMS, the Alaska Medical Station. Deployed. On Monday and Tuesday, we're going to evacuate the Matsu Hospital to include all the Anchorage-based hospitals, 35 patients, not the whole hospital, but we're going to evacuate them and then we're going to move them out of state. So, a real big piece of play for us. I would say the biggest insight is, one, it doesn't take 72 hours to deploy the AMS.

Now, we are in an exercise, but the National Guard was able to move this from the start of the exercise within 6 hours and have it operating. Tomorrow is going to be very busy for us, 65, maybe 75 patients per hour. You know, I just want to say that this is the first time we are the only state in the country that owns one of these, and we are the first state to actually operate one.

So we are partnering, of course, with the state of Alaska to just enhance the capacity of the medical response in this exercise. And so they asked us to deploy our field hospital. And so we're actually standing in the operating room here of our field hospital. This is a Type 2 field hospital that has surgical capacity. In other words, we can provide surgical care for trauma to patients that have been injured from a natural disaster such as an earthquake.

It's a 20-bed facility. And, um, so we provide emergency care as well as, I said, surgical care for these patients.