From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of ... Lake Elsinore?
A company of Camp Pendleton Marines will be arriving via a convoy of 37 vehicles loaded with equipment early Monday, March 23, en route to the lake’s levee.
Their mission: erect two bridges, practice using the spans, then dismantle them, all in the course of five days.
The entire time the approximately 100 Corps members assigned to the project will bivouac, billet and take their Meals Ready to Eat on the the levee by the lake’s inlet channel. The levee along the channel will be closed to the public.
“Lake Elsinore is the only place within 250 miles where we could do this operation,” said Capt. Drew Hicks, Bridge Company commander of the 1st Marine Logistics Group’s 7th Engineer Support Battalion.
For the city, hosting a Marine Corps operation is unprecedented, though other service branches occasionally have trained on the lake.
“We’re looking at this as the first of many opportunities,” said Lake Elsinore Community Services Director Johnathan Skinner. “We’re becoming a training ground for our military, which is great.”
The Marines’ primary logistical challenge will be installing a continuous span improvised ribbon bridge. It consists of floating sections fastened together one piece at a time from one bank to the other.
While the Marines can practice assembling it on the base, they prefer a bigger expanse of water to build a ribbon bridge to the length that would make it essential in combat.
“The last time a continuous span was done by our unit was back in 2002 on the Colorado River,” said 1st Lt. Robert Oliver, the Bridge Company’s operations platoon commander.
However, current Bridge Company personnel have never had an opportunity to build one.
“A continuous span bridge cannot be done at Camp Pendleton,” Hicks said at a City Council briefing recently. “We saw this (opportunity) and we jumped on it.”
While that structure will be built on water, a smaller medium girder bridge will be installed over a dry stream bed on the north bank of the channel. Such bridges, which are built with a series of interlocking bays, are light, but sturdy enough to support a tank.
“A lot of times in military operations we come across obstacles -- (road) gaps -- water,” said Capt. Brent Kershaw, a Bridge Company operations officer. “We have to practice getting through these gaps. We’re practicing for places other than America where we need to move military operations across great distances.”
As opposed to preparatory training on the base, the Lake Elsinore exercise is in essence a full-blown test run, Hicks said.
“We’re actually being evaluated on our ability to conduct a mobility operation for the 1st Marines Expeditionary Force,” he said.
The Marines are scheduled to leave Pendleton at 5 a.m. and arrive around 6 a.m. in Lake Elsinore, exiting at the Railroad Canyon interchange.
Police officers will be on hand to halt traffic at intersections along Railroad Canyon and its westward extension, Diamond Drive, as the convoy proceeds to The Diamond baseball stadium and then the levee.
Conducting a convoy of slow-moving military vehicles amid freeway traffic will in itself be a training operation.
“It’s definitely good practice because you’re not always going to encounter a pristine situation where no other vehicles are present,” Hicks said.
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