Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/439940
T Training www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015 27 Coordination Centre Halifax, the Regional Joint Operations Centre Halifax and Trin- ity, the MARLANT Intelligence unit. "It was the first time we had engaged [the Rangers] in this way, fusing their information products right into ours," Newton said, adding that "synergizing the information flow" of all the partici- pants through an operations centre led to "real-time" information processing and communication with an overall better co- ordinated search. Integrating the Rangers into this kind of networked environment, which included streaming imagery directly from a CP- 140 Aurora aircraft to long-line finish- ing boats, "opened up a whole Pandora's box" of legal issues that we now know need to be resolved," Newton said, but it "enabled" the Rangers in a way never done before. Almost as impressive was the impact the small force of 100 soldiers and sailors had on the community of St. Anthony, and the immediate recognition within JTFA of the response capability that could be devel- oped to address a range of issues affecting northern coastal communities. "Here we were at the last jumping off spot into the Subarctic and we came across a really vibrant community with big fish- eries and new tourism – cruise liners and icebergs and whale watchers – and many of their needs relate to our work in conse- quence management in this big operating environment: search and rescue, surveil- lance, environmental change, their feasi- bility as a maritime port. To hear that out- pouring, we immediately saw the rationale for a different type of exercise, a greater focus on the open stretches of coastlines and a move away from our larger, urban exercises." The harsh winter in Atlantic Canada last year was also a reminder of the vulnerabili- ty of the supply chain throughout much of JTFA's area of responsibility and the tasks it might be called on to perform. In an exercise last April known as Staged Response, 5 Cdn Div and its Reserve ele- ments grappled with managing the conse- quences of two severe storms striking in rapid succession, knocking out power and causing extreme flooding across the Mari- times. That built on the lessons learned at Shipping Blues, an exercise held in March for municipal, provincial and fed- eral government emergency management agencies in which JTFA participated. This exercise tested the response of these agen- cies to a marine-related incident in the re- mote Newfoundland town of Lewisporte. A similar network of agencies was en- gaged six months earlier during Fron- tier Sentinel 2013, an exercise devised to test the CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) response of the various levels of government, the RCMP, local police as well as the Canadian Army, RCN, RCAF and Special Forces to a scenario where a merchant ship, which presents a high terrorism risk, enters a small port. Held in Pictou, Nova Scotia, it activated the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit to neutralize the threat and assess the cargo as well as the army's