USS McInerney Holds International Drill

Quickly the ship became busy with fire parties positioning themselves to fight the out of control fire. Within in minutes, the Norwegian Marines sent their First Response Team to aid the fire fighting, and multiple ships had come to McInerney's aid.

The first to respond was FGS Bayern, a German frigate assigned as the Flagship for the Standing NATO Response Force Maritime Group 1 (SNMG-1).

This was only an exercise, which quickly became a multi national fire and mass casualty drill involving all the ships in the SNMG-1 group.

While the fire was simulated as burning out of control on USS McInerney, the HMCS Montreal set up their hangar as a triage and medical care area. HM1 Strickland, from the McInerney, and PO1 Richard, from the Montreal, under the orders of the Bayern 's Medical Officer, Cmdr. Fohr, set up a medial facility that enabled all the medical teams to work together.

On the McInerney, Lt.j.g. Stephanie Mercier took control and began organizing the assets from the other ships. While in central, Mercier would take the responding ships information and quickly assign them to where they could be the most beneficial during this time of need.

After the drill was complete, Mercier had this to say about the multi national drill, ''today was my first day as the Command Duty Officer. For me, this was good personal training because it allowed me to organize the utilization of international assets. I feel this was solid training, and it was great to see so many nations come together so quickly. In fact, we had responses from ships that were not even expected. The drill was extremely successful considering its amplitude.''

As the ships left Haakonsvern Norway on May 30, headed towards Oslo Norway, and to a new exercise, Exercise Marvika.

During this exercise, the countries of Portugal, Germany, Norway and Canada along with USS McInerney worked as one against small attack boats, protecting high value units and spending numerous hours hunting for submarines.

Most of the exercise took place off the coast of Norway while transiting towards Oslo. A large focus of the four-day exercise was anti-submarine warfare, where the sonar technicians and the Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer, Lt.j.g. Ross Kingdon, spent hours searching for submarines.

On the final day of Marvika, USS McInerney helped escort a high value unit motor vessel safely to Oslo in preparation for possible real world requirements.