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MTMC deploys transportation experts to South Seas Islands

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SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii (USTCNS) --- If a hurricane strikes a remote Pacific island, it's too late to come up with a disaster relief plan when the winds start howling.

With this in mind, the U.S. Army Pacific sends teams to locations throughout Asia and the Pacific to help requesting countries improve their disaster readiness plans.

The teams, headed by Army Civil affairs experts, are called Disaster Preparedness Mitigation Assessment teams.

When USARPAC recently sent a team to the exotic Cook Islands in the South Seas, they turned to the Military Traffic Management Command's 599th Trans Group in Hawaii to provide crucial transportation expertise.

This was the first time that MTMC was asked to participate in a USARPAC Disaster Preparedness Assessment.

Rick Pollom, a traffic management specialist with the 599th, and Grey Marsh, a civil engineer with MTMC's Transportation Engineering Agency, joined ten other team members to assess the remote island chain.

The other team members were experts in such diverse fields as public health, communications, mapping, power, fuel handling, heavy equipment and sanitation.

USARPAC civil affairs, which runs the program, gathered the team members together in Hawaii for mission briefings July 10 and 11, 2000, then flew the whole team to Rarotonga, the main island of the archipelago.

The Cook Islands are a tropical paradise, due south of Hawaii and 1,000 miles below the equator.

The 13 islands are self-governing, though they defer defense matters and external affairs to New Zealand.

Most of the islanders are direct descendents of the ancient Polynesians and virtually everyone speaks both Maori and English.

When the team arrived, the members met with their counterparts in the Cook Islands government.

Pollom and Marsh met with a representative from the Ministry of Transportation, plus the harbormaster and port authority of Avatiu Harbor.

In addition to port surveys of the two main islands of Rarotonga and Aitutake, the MTMC team members also provided a complete transportation analysis, including airports and highways.

Working for two weeks without a day off, the MTMC team members produced a detailed 22-page report which analyzed the whole transportation infrastructure from an engineering viewpoint.

Marsh's expertise in civil engineering was especially invaluable to the highway portion of the report, according to Pollom.

"We would gather information everyday and every night we would write it up and plug it into the template provided to us by the team leader. In this way the report was actually done by the time the mission was over," said Pollom.

Once the team completed its survey, all team members briefed their findings to the Cook Island authorities.

The transportation information was a very useful part of the overall team report, according to Lt. Col. John Solon, USARPAC civil affairs.

"We are planning to have them back on the teams going to all the island nation DPMAs," said Solon.

According to Solon, the report won't just benefit the Cook Islanders. He noted that the final report and mapping will go to the U.S. Pacific Command for the United States to use if it ever needs to respond to a disaster in that country.

Solon added that the program establishes and reinforces professional contacts and working relationships between: the U.S. military and Foreign Service, other U.S. governmental organizations, host nation and territorial government leaders, Non-Governmental Organizations, Private Volunteer Organizations and other International Organizations.

The DPMA program is run and operated by U.S. Army Civil Affairs joined by the Center of Excellence and the Pacific Disaster Center, both headquartered in Hawaii.

One of the benefits of the mission was the opportunity for team members to establish close working and personal relationships with host nation officials and private citizens.

The most important benefit was the invaluable knowledge and preparedness which the Cook Islanders and the U.S. government gained through the study. (FROM 599TH TRANSPORTATION GROUP PUBLIC AFFAIRS).

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