This summer, the United States and Canadian Coast Guards will partner in a pollution response exercise in Maine, intending to help prepare both governments if such an occurrence were to happen. This exercise, called CANUSLANT 2019 – Canadian/United States Atlantic Exercise – is designed as a learning environment for players to exercise emergency response plans, policies, and procedures as they pertain to an incident that is significant enough to justify activation of a coordinated joint US/Canada response under the Atlantic Geographic Annex.
In preparation for this major exercise, the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) requested EMSI to tailor our ICS-620 Area Command course to CCG specific policies and Canadian elements and regulations. As the current national ICS provider for the US Coast Guard, the CCG believed that using the same provider would best enable a seamless integration of the two services during this exercise and potential real-world responses. In crafting this first ever Canadian delivery of ICS-620, EMSI worked diligently with CCG representatives to ensure that appropriate agencies were reflected in the scenarios, as well discussion points related to the differences between US practices and Canadian response tactics. Reworking existing course materials and the supporting exercise components enabled EMSI to quickly develop a course that met CCG needs, while also maintaining commonalities from the USCG course that will provide common ground between the services’ training and exercises.
As a global leader in the training and application of ICS, our instructors possess years of real-world Area Command experience that is translated into classroom exercises that simulate many of the issues that our team members have experienced on a response. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, EMSI deployed over 36 team members to assist in the Area Command Post, specifically coaching Area Command personnel in their responsibilities.
Within the last eighteen months, EMSI has delivered ten Area Command courses to the US Coast Guard; as well as a delivery to the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency, the US Department of Energy, and their partners in preparation for the Super Bowl 53. With each delivery, we consider best practices learned and areas for improvement to provide the best training we can for Area Commands.
A U.S. Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) founded in 2000, EMSI is a premier all-hazards, full-service, multi-discipline incident management and emergency management services and solutions provider, specializing in multiple aspects of incident management and emergency management, including all-hazards ICS and IMT training, exercises, development, and program support. A global leader in the training and application of the ICS, EMSI has been serving the government and private sector all-hazards incident management community for nearly two decades. In 2013, EMSI established EMSI Canada Ventures, a subsidiary of EMSI, as a separate and distinct Canadian corporation. Registered as a business in Alberta, Canada, all EMSI services provided to our Canadian clients are delivered through EMSI Canada Ventures.
To learn more about EMSI and how we can help your organization’s response preparedness and ICS training programs, please visit www.emsics.com.