- Marines engage in many operations on land and at sea, from warfare to humanitarian assistance. In the event of a natural disaster, Marines can assist in disaster relief.
- In the event of a hurricane’s landfall, Marines may support local response efforts by evacuating residents.
- Two journalists embedded themselves on a Marine search and rescue mission to see how this military branch responds during natural disasters.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Retired US Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink: The military is trained to solve problems. And those problems could be, some kind of a humanitarian assistance that’s needed, or they can be some kind of disaster relief, or really anything else that you could imagine. The military trains its personnel so they can be used in those situations, no matter how dynamic they are, they’re ready.
[Business Insider sent two journalists to cover Hurricane Florence in September 2018.]
Daniel Brown: The storm hit Friday morning at 8:00 a.m.
Kevin Reilly: The winds were blowing enough where I had to brace myself. It was windy, but I’ve never seen that much rain. We drove towards Wilmington. There was a lot of trees down, power lines were down and the street lights were out. There was no power anywhere.
Brown: We had heard that they were doing rescues in Jacksonville as well. I put a call into some of the authorities and looked like we could get some sort of embed. There were a bunch of Marines just standing out there, so we jumped in the back of those seven-ton trucks.
Reilly: Even though we were in these giant trucks, there were a few times where we came to crossings that the Marines themselves stopped to check it out or would send just one of the trucks across to see if it was gonna be okay.
Brown: Those Marines, they’re based in Camp Lejeune. Camp Lejeune is a Marine base in North Carolina. Before the storm, the camp did not put out mandatory evacuations and they got a lot of flack from journalists and so forth. They said that they were gonna stay and fight actually, is the quote. The main mission seemed to be to grab 30 residents of Richlands, North Carolina. They had to be evacuated from their homes and they were stranded in this fire station in this little town, so the Marines had to come and get ’em.
Reilly: A lot of these people were given only a moment’s notice to grab what they could and were just taken out of their homes. They had their pets and you could see, everybody just had this look of exhaustion, uncertainty, confusion and, I would say they looked scared, but at the same time just seeing the Marines and the volunteer firemen and all the other rescuers there, very professional in everything that they did. So they loaded them up with all of their remaining possessions and pets, and they were taken to a high school shelter that was somewhere close to the Jacksonville area.
Brown: In general, whenever there’s like a natural disaster in a state, the National Guard is the one that’s supposed to like really help with relief. Marines generally don’t do that, the only reason they did is just ’cause Camp Lejeune is in their backyard. I had authorities tell me that the only reason they were really doing this is just ’cause it’s their community as well.
Retired US Navy SEAL, Leif Babin: For disaster relief scenarios, military units are a perfect response for that, because you’ve got an organized group that can deploy; you’ve got a logistics base, and it’s actually a great exercise for deploying to combat that actually helps our military stay ready and can also help civilians in need during a natural disaster.
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Source: Business Insider – kreilly@businessinsider.com (Kevin Reilly)