In 2011, the Vintage Vessel National Center of Expertise (VVNCOE), located in Duluth, Minn., capitalized on this unique situation to create a focused and valuable training evolution for marine inspectors. The VVNCOE, which specializes in dealing with older vessels and technology, used the breakout to provide on-the-job training for marine inspectors working toward their dry dock, machinery, or hull-inspector qualifications. In addition to bolstering inspector capability and experience, this training brought additional personnel from around the Coast Guard to act as invaluable force multipliers for District 9 units. Now in its second year, the Spring Breakout training has proven to be an effective and popular event. In 2012, 30 inspectors from 20 units outside of the 9th District applied for the 19 available positions.

 

Hard-water Capabilities

Seasonality cuts both ways in the 9th District, of course; if you want to gain proficiency in ice rescues, or in responding to pollution in an icy environment, summer is the off season – and it’s not likely to give you many opportunities for practice. Often, expanding training opportunities involves finding one of the first or last frozen bodies of water in the region. “We’ve used lots of different things to practice moving on the ice,” said Capt. Andy Sugimoto, 9th District chief of incident management, “but you still have to put somebody in the water and haul them out, and that’s only done on a pond or something similar. And not all of the lakes freeze the same way, so you may have to travel to another place to start to get up to speed on the use of the airboat, or some other skill, in order to get those qualifications.”

Fortunately, the unique ice rescue skills developed over generations in District 9 – the Coast Guard’s Ice Capabilities Center of Excellence is located at Station Saginaw River in Michigan – have expanded its opportunities for practice. Ice rescuers from the Center of Excellence frequently pass their knowledge and skills along to first responders in the district – in the spring of 2012, they worked with federal customs officials, Border Patrol agents, and local law enforcement officers on rescues and long-haul airboat operations in temperatures that reached minus 36 F – and across the country. In April 2012, ice rescue instructors from Saginaw spent two weeks training first responders in several native villages in coastal Alaska, and training alongside other first responders from Anchorage, Nome, and Barrow.

A large-scale rescue requires interagency cooperation on many levels, and the 9th District’s hard-water proficiency program underwent a first-of-its-kind operation in January 2012: a simulated plane crash on a frozen waterway near Green Bay, Wis., that involved the Coast Guard and more than two dozen partner agencies. “We worked with local, county, and state responders to simulate rescuing individuals off out on the ice – getting them to a safe location, triaging, and other things,” said Sugimoto. “We’ve divided the lakes up into four sectors, and the intention is to sort of move that training from year to year to a different sector to continue to provide that expertise and knowledge to the other sectors, to make sure they have a good understanding of what to do in case there’s a mass causality event.”

Pollution response is another Coast Guard mission that often involves multiple jurisdictions, said Jerry Popiel, an incident management and preparedness adviser for District 9. “Imagine a tug that goes aground on the north shore of Lake Superior,” he said, “spilling oil that impacts tribal lands. Perhaps it also impacts nesting areas for our endangered piping plover. It’s a state jurisdiction. It’s a county jurisdiction. It’s a federal jurisdiction. … If that same area happens to be on a border area where we’re now impacting Canadian internal waters, you can see that very quickly you have four, five, six different jurisdictions at play here. And who’s in charge? How do you work together? How do you make all this happen? Our proficiency at the management level will make that piece of a response work more efficiently. We have a joint response team with U.S. and Canadian counterparts working to plan how we respond in environments that cross the border, how to provide aid to each other.”

In the 9th District, it isn’t so much the seasonality that might make an oil spill responder lose his or her edge: It’s the fierceness with which the Great Lakes agencies, including the Coast Guard, protect the main supply of drinking water for millions of Americans and Canadians in the region. The partnerships that have led to fewer and smaller spills overall have also given oil responders little to do – a good problem to have, and remedied by numerous tabletop and full-scale joint exercises.

Operationally, removing oil from ice, or the water/ice mixture known as brash ice, may be one of the most difficult problems facing a vessel operator in winter. In January 2012, in the Straits of Mackinac, incident management professionals from District 9 performed a demonstration in which they demonstrated different oil recovery tactics such as skimmers and booms in brash ice. “We basically first do the research and development,” said Popiel, “and then try out the tactics, and then share those tactics both within our own region as well as with others. We had some representatives from the Arctic response community actually come down to our oil and ice demonstration in January.”

 

Clear, Achievable, and Measurable Results

When he and other leaders in the 9th District designed the elements of the proficiency program, Parks understood it wouldn’t be enough to merely increase the number of practice and training opportunities. The program had to maintain a strict focus – it had to avoid adding complexity to existing programs. It had to involve consistent training and evaluations rooted in discrete standards, rather than some vague notion of excellence – and these standards had to be expressed just as concretely, if not as simply, for the marine inspector, who requires a specific knowledge base for his or her work, as for the small arms operator whose success can be measured in target hits.

“Our commandant has made it very clear that one of our responsibilities is to honor our profession. It’s one of his guiding principles. And part of that is to become as proficient and as capable as possible in executing the missions,” said Parks. “We weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. There were very well-established and very effective training programs across these mission sets – in the boats, in the cutters, in the aircraft, in the marine safety inspection regimen. The new program is a response to the recognition that we could be losing our edge – and that the way to maintain professional mission execution is to develop very clear and defined proficiency programs that were supportive of the existing training programs.”

This article first appeared in: Coast Guard Outlook: 2012 Summer Edition.