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(From left) Maj. Eric Templeton of Illinois Wing Headquarters and a pair of Minnesota Wing members, Capt. Nash Pherson of the Mankato Composite Squadron and 1st Lt. George Anderson of the North Hennepin Composite Squadron, man the command center at Civil Air Patrol’s flood response mission base at Hector International Airport in Fargo, N.D.
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Members prepare three ARCHER-equipped Gippsland GA-8 Airvans for flight at Hector International Airport.
Photos by Lt. Col. Troy C. Krabbenhoft, North Dakota Wing
Maj. Richard J. Sprouse
Public Information Officer
2010 Flood Operations-Minnesota
Minnesota Wing
NORTH DAKOTA – Aircraft and members from seven wings have returned home after providing nearly 360 hours of flight time supporting disaster relief efforts in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota.
“Our mission is complete,” said Maj. Eric Templeton, the Illinois Wing’s emergency services officer and director of operations, who directed CAP’s ARCHER flights over the Red River Valley and other parts of North Dakota from the organization’s flood response mission base at Fargo’s Hector International Airport. “I’d like to express my personal thanks to everyone who directly and indirectly supported our activities, especially those who covered for us back home.”
CAP sent aircrews from the Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin wings to the Fargo mission base. They flew 160 still photography and ARCHER flights, delivering 1,100 images and 1,270 gigabytes of ARCHER information to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, North Dakota Emergency Operations Center, U.S. Geological Service, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Minnesota Department of Transportation. Aircrews from South Dakota Wing, meanwhile, delivered another 570 images to their state's Emergency Operations Center.
The Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance, or ARCHER, is flown aboard CAP’s Australian-built Gippsland GA-8 aircraft. Developed a few years ago specifically for CAP to aid in search and rescue, homeland security and disaster relief, ARCHER is one of the most sophisticated nonclassified airborne imaging systems in the world. It provides both high-resolution and hyperspectral imaging capabilities through two advanced sensors onboard each CAP Airvan.
Federal and state emergency management officials used ARCHER images taken in North Dakota and Minnesota to determine the extent of the flood inundation along the Red River and other rivers and tributaries as they crested, as well as to help analyze the integrity of several earthen dams. The images also helped officials improve the snow melt models used to predict water levels for the river and its tributaries.
“This provided more than just situational awareness,” said Capt. Nash Pherson of the Minnesota Wing’s Mankato Composite Squadron, who helped coordinate the ARCHER flights. “We were able to rapidly provide high-resolution imagery that could be pulled into the mapping systems used by emergency response decision-makers.”
More than 30 flying four GA-8 Airvans and 12 other aircraft provided ARCHER information.
“Each agency was very happy with the speed and quality of the data it received from ARCHER,” Templeton said. “North Dakota officials are interested in some longer-term tasking activities to support other needs of the state.”
In addition, other aircrews often used the 12 support planes at the Fargo mission base “to provide ice jam patrols all over the state as well as still images of rivers and tributaries,” said Lt. Col. Bill Kay, director of operations for the North Dakota Wing and its incident commander for the mission.
“Our crews worked the Missouri, Knife, Heart and Cannonball rivers in central North Dakota, while others flew the James, Sheyenne, North Red, Forest and Park rivers on the eastern side of the state from the North Dakota-South Dakota border to Canada,” Kay said. “We are still doing that even today, albeit at a lesser degree.”
Similar activities were repeated on rivers and tributaries in South Dakota. Capt. John Seten, the South Dakota Wing’s director of operations and incident commander, said aircrews flew over flooded areas and took geographically tagged aerial photographs of ice jams and flood damage that were used by the state EOC.
