NPS Joins In Largest Rescue Exercise In World

On April 13th, NPS personnel from Grand Canyon National Park, Saguaro National Park, Coronado National Memorial, and Chiricahua National Monument participated in a challenging 55-patient mass casualty exercise at Grand Canyon, part of a much larger coordinated exercise known as Resolute Angel.

Resolute Angel, a civil disaster training event planned by the U.S. Air Force, was carried out concurrently with the two-week-long Operation Angel Thunder military exercise that is the world’s largest personnel recovery exercise, integrating allied agencies as well as state, national, and multinational assets dedicated to saving lives in demanding circumstances.

Angel Thunder events include high-altitude and urban-irregular warfare, contested operations, and air-sea battles that provide realistic training for 2,000 participants. These scenarios were taking place over 40,000 square miles of Arizona and New Mexico to simulate U.S. embassy and federal employee recoveries. The air-sea battle scenarios spanned an area from New Mexico to the California coast. Resolute Angel has been incorporated within Operation Angel Thunder to challenge civil disaster response personnel with realistic training.

The scenario for the Grand Canyon exercise involved a high-speed collision of two vehicles with a park shuttle bus at the Yaki Point Overlook that struck a group of young visitors taking a photo at the rim. Fifty moulaged USAF ROTC volunteers served as patients.

The ROTC personnel, along with NPS personnel from the Southern Arizona Group and Air Force pararescue personnel, were transported aboard HC-130 aircraft provided by the U.S. Air Force and Columbian Air Force in an administrative airlift to the Grand Canyon National Park Airport. The Grand Canyon exercise involved 84 emergency responders from regional EMS agencies, including Guardian Medical Transport, Lifeline Ambulance, Tusayan Fire Department, Coconino County Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue, and Department of Defense.

Additional challenges facing personnel involved in the exercise were the requirements for fire suppression, vehicle stabilization and extrication and for technical rescue response to reach and transport six patients from below the canyon rim. The training exercise was covered by twelve representatives from regional and international media.

While the MCI drill was occurring at Grand Canyon, two other large-scale disaster exercises were simultaneously occurring to completely challenge statewide response capabilities. Catastrophic earthquake events were staged in the White Mountains of Arizona and in Reserve, New Mexico, on the Arizona border. Mock patients from all three major disasters were airlifted by military HC-130 aircraft to Phoenix and Tucson hospitals, creating an intentional surge that tested the disaster capabilities of these selected facilities. An additional simulation within the Resolute Angel exercise included the crash of an inbound HC-130 aircraft with patients on approach to Tucson.

The feedback from participants at Grand Canyon highlighted the personal experience of being involved in such a complex, realistic event with interagency involvement, including the Department of Defense. The high-fidelity training exercise allowed responders to experience numerous real-world lessons learned and created a very unique learning environment.