Soldiers assist Afghan civilians away from the avalanche area. Photo by Spec. William E. Henry When Lt. Col. Kris Ellis, the former commander of the 442nd Signal Battalion and the recent Strategic Communications Director for the Signal Center of Excellence, arrived in Afghanistan in January 2010 as an individual augmentee, he thought he was slated to be the Officer-in-Charge of the Joint Visitors Bureau for Regional Command East / Combined Joint Task Force 82 . Instead, he was assigned as the Night Shift Director for the Joint Operations Center, or JOC. “The JOC is the nerve center of the command”, said Ellis, “we track current operations for the Division Commander, and we synchronize efforts across the five Battlespace Owners (Brigade-level Headquarters). Each shift covers a remarkable range and number of issues: improvised explosive device strikes, tribal shuras, container delivery system drops, a handshake tour by NFL players, and cordons & searches. If you’ve ever watched what happens right after the opening bell rings on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, then you have a pretty good idea of what the JOC Bridge looks like 24 hours a day.”

The night of February 8 was a typical night on the Bridge when reports began to trickle in about a possible avalanche near the Salang Tunnel. The tunnel is located in Parwan province, and links northern and southern Afghanistan, crossing the Hindukush mountain range through the historic Salang Pass. Construction on the tunnel was completed by the Soviet Union and Afghanistan in 1964, and it was the highest road tunnel in the world until 1973, when the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel was built in the Rocky Mountains. The tunnel was partially destroyed during fighting between the Afghan Northern Alliance and the Taliban in 1998, and only reopened in late 2001. Ellis said, “Salang is more than a single tunnel. It’s a series of cliff-hugging switchbacks at almost 11,000 feet, in some of the most beautiful and forbidding terrain you can imagine. Think of carving out a road across the very top of the highest Swiss Alp.”

The first reports of the avalanche came in from local Afghan police and a German national who had been trapped in the avalanche and had a satellite phone. The Weather Officer confirmed that there had been a blizzard in the pass for a couple of days: but that same weather kept all surveillance assets (Predator drones) and helicopters out of the pass. Another piece of evidence was that satellite imagery showed old avalanche fields in the pass. “And, we had Google”, said Ellis. “The website for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense had reliable information about a previous avalanche in February 2002. We also found out that about 15,000 vehicles transited the pass every day, so that meant a large number of people might have been affected. The bottom line is that while we didn’t have any clear reports about the avalanche, we had some circumstantial evidence. A CJTF is like an aircraft carrier: it is incredibly powerful, but it has a massive turning radius. With only partial information, we had to make the decision whether or not to start turning the Division. In the end, what made the difference was the fact that several thousand vehicles a day transit the pass, and there was a possibility that we had a disaster on our hands. Even with limited reporting, we began to reconfigure the CJTF on the night of the 8th.”

Planning began for a major humanitarian operation: search & rescue, medical support, snow removal, relief centers, recovery of remains, food, security, command and control, and logistics. The JOC Bridge quickly pulled together Route Clearance Packages, engineer assets, and aviation packages from across the CJTF. “We also found a Marine Gunnery Sergeant in our Special Operations Task Force who was a former instructor at a military mountaineering school, a couple other Special Forces personnel who were avid climbers, and an Army Reservist who was in charge of snow removal for a major airport in Wisconsin,” said Ellis.

The momentum from the night of the 8th was put to good use on the morning of the 9th, when it became clear that a catastrophic event had occurred. A series of at least seventeen avalanches had struck the area around the tunnel, burying miles of road, instantly killing dozens of Afghans, stranding thousands more, burying hundreds of cars, and sweeping buses and trucks down vertical slopes. U.S. Army Chinook helicopters and U.S. Air Force Para-rescue Jumpers closed on the highest and most remote sites at first light. Unmanned drones surveyed the damage, identifying pockets of survivors, and streaming video to first responders on the ground. The ANA swarmed to the site, and thousands of Afghan troops began to work the rescue by hand: chains of Afghan soldiers passed survivors across the snow.

“The avalanche was much worse than 2002”, said Ellis. “We guessed right, it was a major disaster. Had we not begun our effort on the night of the 8th, more Afghans would have died. The weather also cleared on the 9th: if the blizzard didn’t lift, the situation would have been much worse.”

On the first day, Coalition Forces moved 267 survivors to Bagram Airfield by air. The passenger terminal was turned into a medical triage, and one of the installation’s gyms was converted into a refugee center. The Joint Task Force also began to push humanitarian relief supplies to other relief centers: by the end of the 9th, Coalition Forces had moved thousands of pounds of food, water, blankets, cots, and medical supplies to refugee centers operated by GIRoA. More than 170 Afghans were killed by the avalanche, but Coalition Forces and the ANSF rescued almost 3,000.