 My name is Staff Sergeant Vanessa Ramos. I am an Emergency Management Craftsman at the 628th Civil Engineer Squadron, Readiness and Emergency Management Flight. Our mission here is to prevent, prepare, respond, and recover from any man-made or natural disasters. So a lot goes into preparedness. So we have a community outreach program where we go out to schools, speak with parents and teachers, and overall joint-based staff, and talk about preparedness before a disaster, so having a kit, having a plan for your families, and a communication plan if communications get difficult or if they go down. Then we also prepare the base for disasters. So we manage the Emergency Management Program. So we train Emergency Operations Center reps, unit control center reps, with through training, and then we also prepare ourselves as emergency responders. Good Lord. We prepare ourselves as emergency responders through training and exercises. So we prepare ourselves as a flight with a lot of in-house training, with regular exercises, response exercises for a chemical, biological, or radiological response. And then we have a small piece in base-wide exercises. So the Emergency Operations Center, we have to exercise and stay proficient with our duties in there. Our role in response is to detect any harmful agents and provide samples and cordon it off. And then we also have a part in decontaminating any person that came into contact with the harmful substance. So we advise the incident commander if it's a man-made disaster that we're responding to, and then we can respond if we have to go in and identify and collect samples for identification on cordon off. As far as responding in the Emergency Operations Center, we sort of manage all the ESFs and we assist the Emergency Operations Center director. So we advise the incident commander and the EOC director because we, by providing expertise on different topics, we write the installation emergency management plan, which is a step-by-step checklist for any kind of disaster. And it involves all the emergency support functions, so we have a little bit of knowledge on that. So a typical response, a man-made response would be a suspicious package delivery. We could respond to that. We could respond to an on-base or an off-base airplane crash. We could respond to a meth lab. We're trained to respond to that as well. As far as natural disasters, it could be anything from a snowstorm to a flood to a hurricane. So as far as recovery, depending on what kind of recovery emergency, what kind of recovery we're running, it would be just to make sure that we stay on track and we follow through and document. A lot of recovery is documentation and making sure that we hit each agenda set. The most common incident here on base is a hurricane. It's a natural disaster, so it seems we have one every year. So we prepare with community outreach with our emergency management plan and by training and running an exercise every year. We respond with our hurricane ride-out teams and our recovery teams. The recovery teams obviously have a big part in recovering the base, so restoring regular operations so that all the families can come back. All the students can come back and we can start putting planes in the air again. So prevention is more about preventing the loss of life and damage and therefore stoppage to the mission. So that's where prevention goes into. So every time we respond, we have something called a hot wash. Our lessons learned where we sit down with all agencies involved and we put forth a plan to respond better, improve, train better so that we can recover quickly and prevent further loss of life and mission stoppage. I feel very honored and I feel the sense of responsibility to make sure that I do a good job. Make sure that I convey the importance of what we do, whether you're attending CBRN class or you're attending emergency operations center class so that we prepare everyone who attends to the best of our abilities so that they can do their job because what we do is very serious. EOC brings together every office of primary responsibility throughout the base and we respond to whatever disaster is occurring by running through our checklist and giving support to whatever response is happening. So in the EOC we control resources, whether that be a generator, a response team, that's pretty much what we do. So it's important that we all get together and congregate. It could be the emergency operations center where all the responders actually kind of physically go there or it could be via our virtual operations center but a lot of crosstalk happens. So let's say someone needs six buses, someone at the next table over is ready to help you. A lot of the functions tie in together so it's good that we're in there to help each other, lean on each other as a team. Our emergency response trailer, we have quite a bit of equipment on there so we have anything to... We have detection gear, so chemical detection there. We have biological sample abilities. We have radiological detection so we use all this different piece of equipment to identify and collect and cordon off any kind of hazard. And we also have PPE on there so we have three different types of respirators that we could wear. We have two different suits. So the best protection we have is the level A suit. So that suit is fully encapsulating so you're in this big bubble suit that's airtight and we wear a firehawk mask underneath and a air tank strapped onto our back and we use that to respond to any kind of hazard. In particular, if it's an unknown hazard, we know that we're well protected in that suit. We sort of look like little astronauts and they're funny. The info trailer is what we call it so we love taking that out particularly to schools. The kids get really excited when they see us roll up. The outside says it's a response trailer and the inside is wrapped to outline every kind of natural disaster that has happened in the state of South Carolina and it has a timeline and we bring a lot of educational goodies for them. So lots of coloring books, lots of crossword puzzles, stress balls and cell phone holders, things of that nature. I think what we do here is very important because we are a program that reaches all sides of the base. So everyone on base whether you know it or not is indirectly affected by what we do here particularly in any kind of disaster emergency. That's when our phones start ringing and folks want to know what's up with this checklist. How do I do this? What's the best way to do that? So I think what we do is very important as far as prevention as well. So the everyday training sessions that we run here that we schedule has an effect on base and on the community overall. Emergency management is a joint task so everyone on base we rely heavily on every agency. We like to call, speak with them, bounce ideas off of them. We like to pick their brains particularly when it comes to our emergency management plan and any kind of response. Everything that we do heavily involves their expertise too. So emergency management can do our jobs without all the help and all the agencies on base and their knowledge about their jobs.