Emergency training exercise delivers food by air

The Oregon Disaster Airlift Response Team (ODART) recently conducted an exercise it called “Whale Run 2024,” during which volunteer pilots airlifted food supplies to several coastal locations in a simulated response to a catastrophic Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami.

Although the disaster was a simulation, the food was real, and when it was delivered on Saturday, June 15, volunteers from local food pantries were on hand to accept the delivery and put that food to use serving those in need.

In Lincoln County, one plane filled with food landed at around 12:45 p.m. at the Newport Municipal Airport and was offloaded by volunteers from the Newport Food Pantry. In Lincoln City, a seaplane landed on Devils Lake and the food supplies were offloaded at the dock at Regatta Park (see related story).

The pilot landing in Newport was Mike Berck, an ODART volunteer whose plane is based in Mulino. On Saturday, he loaded up 299 pounds of food in Aurora — a portion of the 400-pound load he had picked up the week before in Walla Walla, Washington — and brought it to the coast.

Volunteers from the Newport Food Pantry had assembled at the airport around 11 a.m. to receive the shipment, but the arrival time was pushed back. During their wait, the sunshine turned to rain, creating some question as to whether the plane would be able to land. But that rain turned back to sunshine a short time before Berck’s plane arrived.

The Newport Food Pantry’s mission is “To assist in eliminating hunger in Lincoln County by offering a supply of food to those residents facing food insecurity.” So when the pantry was contacted by ODART to see if volunteers would be able to show up and help offload the plane, the answer was a quick “yes.” An email from ODART to the food pantry stated, “All you’d have to do is transport the cargo from the airport back to your facility.”

This delivery of food was only a portion of the overall Whale Run 2024 exercise. On June 8 and 9, food was flown to several staging areas in the Willamette Valley. On June 13-15, pilots were involved in aerial reconnaissance, which would be needed in an emergency situation to assess damage and evaluate the ability to reach affected areas. And then the “impact area delivery” flights to the coast took place on June 15.

According to the organizers of the drill, all facets were intended to help ODART evaluate and refine protocols established through training and during prior exercises, and to help validate new operational procedures and forms. In addition to planes delivering the food, there were communications personnel on the ground to transmit flight arrival and departure reports from the destination airfields to the ODART operations center via the amateur radio Winlink system for use in aircraft safety.