Team Sheppard rescues food after commissary power outage

  • Published
  • By George Woodward
  • 82nd Training Wing Public Affairs
SHEPPARD AIR FORCE BASE, Texas --  An early-morning lightning strike that shut down power to the Commissary brought out the best in Team Sheppard Sept. 26, as hundreds of people and virtually every unit on base helped save about $200,000 in perishable food.

"This is exactly what a contingency response should look like," said 82nd Mission Support Group Commander Col. Burke Beaumont. "I'm really proud of how the team responded - everyone did exactly what they were trained to do and performed with complete professionalism."

The lightning strike hit at 3:15 a.m., destroying the transformer that serves the Commissary. Fortunately, a replacement was quickly found; just as fortunately, the crane needed for the operation had just returned from the shop.

While the civil engineering team began work on the transformer, the Emergency Operations Center team assembled and began developing possible solutions for saving the food.

"The team from Public Health was awesome," Beaumont said. "They really led us as we developed possible courses of actions and helped us focus on ensuring the safety of the food we were dealing with."

Using a generator to power the Commissary was the obvious solution - but unfortunately not possible for a variety of reasons. In the end, the only viable option to save the perishable food was to move it to other facilities on base.

The challenge was that in order to preserve the quality and safety of the food, it had to be moved quickly.

"In order to prevent bacteria growth, you have to keep food under certain temperatures," said 1st Lt. Chawntel Vega of the 82nd Medical Group's Public Health Flight. "Which means it can only be outside of a cold environment for a very limited amount of time."

In other words, it wasn't just a simple matter of loading up all of the perishable items at the Commissary at one time, trucking it all to another location and then unloading it all. It had to be a rolling operation so that each load of food was only outside of the acceptable temperature range for a few short minutes.

"At that point, we sent out the bat signal," Beaumont said. "We got about 50 technical training students as well as volunteers from all over the base as well as the entire Commissary staff, about 100 people in all, and started to set up teams on both ends of the operation."

The 82nd Logistics Readiness Squadron rounded up trucks and figured out how to manually open the power doors of the Commissary's loading dock. The 82nd Civil Engineering Squadron brought in small generators and light stands so teams could work inside the dark, windowless building.

As the trucks backed up to the dock, the team collected every grocery, bread and dairy cart the Commissary had and began filling them and loading them on the trucks as fast as possible. Each truck then got a Security Forces escort to one of the several base facilities to ensure there were no traffic delays. Once the trucks arrived, other teams immediately unloaded them and got them back into cold storage.

Meanwhile, the entire Public Health team members rode with each truck, monitoring the entire process, checking temperatures and ensuring food remained safe. In addition, they set up four screening points -
two for food items going out and two for food items coming in. Ultimately the food was triple screened to ensure safety.

"It was amazing to watch," Beaumont said. "Everyone worked perfectly together, and I never heard a word of complaint about anything."

As the operation progressed, however, the team became concerned they would not have enough cold storage to save all the food. Fortunately the other leg of "Team Sheppard" - the community - stepped in to help.

Through Ms. Dee Ann Martin, who has served as one of 80th Flying Training Wing's Country Sponsors for decades, put the team in contact with Mark Yowell, Regional Vice President for United Supermarkets.

"Mark graciously donated the use of a 42-foot freezer truck," Beaumont said, "which was the final piece of the puzzle. It was just what we needed, exactly when we needed it."

Meanwhile, the transformer team was able to restore power much faster than anticipated--the transformer was replaced and the Commissary powered up just before 1 p.m.

"That was really important because it meant the Commissary staff could verify the integrity of their freezers and refrigerators, and plenty of time to get them to the appropriate temperatures for a normal Sunday opening," Beaumont said.

But the work was not done. At 9 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 27, the team reassembled - and many of the same volunteers returned - to reverse the whole operation and get the food safely back into the Commissary.

Teams were restocking shelves even as the Commissary opened at 11 a.m. By 2:30 p.m., the job was done.

"It's one of those experiences that make you proud to be part of not only Team Sheppard, but the Air Force," Beaumont said. "We didn't exactly train for this, but in the end it was the expertise, training and can-do attitude of each part of the team that made it successful."

"It wasn't the weekend any of us planned - but it was awesome to be a part of it," he said.