Bagram Airmen move Army Force Provider camps

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Kevin Tomko
  • 455th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (AFNEWS) --  A familiar sight at this Afghanistan airfield involves American C-17 Globemaster IIIs landing and maneuvering as Russian-built IL-76 cargo aircraft taxies for departure. While one aircraft is being unloaded, another is waiting next in line to take off while another prepares to land.

Airmen from one squadron here work around the clock in 12-hour shifts seven days a week to keep the cargo moving at Bagram Air Base.

In early April, Airmen of the 455th Expeditionary Logistics Readiness Squadron had the task of not only handling their normal work loads, but also expediting a new camp system the Army uses, called Force Provider.

Force Provider is a process of building camps using a type of modular construction and shipping everything in containers.

"Basically they are canned camps," said Senior Master Sgt. James Shay, the aerial port superintendent. "They have different modules. Everything is in them. They have dining facilities, laundry, latrines and billeting."

The camps are shipped in 8-foot containers designed to be handled easily. They can be trucked or airdropped to remote locations.

"The main purpose of the camps is transitional housing where you can put them up fast and take them down fast," said Franklin Hinton, a member of the technical assistance team for Force Provider. "The camps that were just unloaded here take about two weeks to build. We're building seven of these camps in Iraq right now."

To handle the added task of moving these Force Provider containers, squadron Airmen used certain methods to save time and manpower.

One way to save time was to line up two 60K aircraft cargo loaders back to back when unloading the IL-76.

"We park them back to back behind the IL-76 because this cargo plane holds nine containers. Six containers go on the first K-loader and three go on the second," said Chief Master Sgt. Edward Ratka, the superintendent of the 455th ELRS. "Instead of driving each K-loader up to the plane separately, we park them back to back, line them up and unload it all at once."

The aerial port easily broke Bagram AB's record for handling cargo in a single week -- surpassing the previous record midway through the week, Chief Ratka said.

"I'm really proud of our people for what they have done on this rotation" said Chief Ratka. "We unloaded 360 of these containers last week, and that's in addition to our normal work load."

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