Emergency Management Programs Section

HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah – During a speech at the annual Air and Space Conference, Sept. 18, 2017, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said, “The Air Force has put forward a budget that begins to restore the force’s readiness so it can win any fight, any time.”

Because of this focus on restoring force readiness, changes were made to AFI 10-2501, Air Force Emergency Management Program. Airmen now must attend the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Awareness & Survival Skills Class every 18 months. It used to be that Airmen had to attend the class every three years or before a deployment to a medium- or high-threat area.

CBRN Awareness & Survival Skills provides refresher training on how to properly don chemical gear as well as accomplish post-attack recovery actions such as checking M8 paper, using M295 kits to decontaminate equipment, and using reactive skin decontamination lotion to save lives.

The Hill AFB Readiness & Emergency Management (EM) Flight has quickly adapted to the changes in AFI 10-2501. To make scheduling more efficient, the EM training section enabled Expeditionary Readiness Training (ERT) Program Manager John Felty to directly schedule deployers for CBRN training through the Automated Readiness Information System (ARIS). This made sense because for the longest time, the EM training section would have to manually input ERT walk-ins in ARIS, which was inefficient and time consuming.

EM is seeing the impact of the AFI’s updated requirement in that they used to teach classes twice a month at building 732. Now, EM is teaching 1-2 additional classes per month with 10-30 students in each class.

In Secretary Wilson’s speech, she also said that “readiness is first and foremost about people” and that “readiness is also about training.” The 775th Civil Engineer Squadron’s EM Flight is here to help keep Team Hill Airmen ready to fly, fight, and win!