While students took a break over the holiday season to read up on next term’s courses or spend some time on turkey and family, Waterloo’s Combat Engineers were flown across the country to take park in the annual Canadian Forces Paladin Response exercise.
Drawing from brigades across Land Force Western Area (LFWA) and Land Force Central Area (LFCA), Combat Engineers from across Western Canada and Ontario gathered in Chilliwack, British Columbia to take part in the exercise which would see round-robin competitions to build two different bridges and a raft.
Waterloo’s 48 Engineer Squadron, a part of 31 Combat Engineer Regiment (The Elgins), would send four engineers to the exercise with all four commanding parts of the bridge builds and teardowns.
Surrounded by mountains in the Fraser Valley, Chilliwack, BC is the former home of the Canadian Forces School of Military Engineering from 1942 when it was called A6 Canadian Engineer Training Center until it was moved to CFB Gagetown in Oromocto, NB in 1998.
The exercise saw over 180 combat engineers and officers compete in three teams to build and tear down an ACROW bridge, Medium Girder Bridge (MGB) and Medium Raft (MR). Teams competed to see who could build each mobility project twice before the end of the day.
Besides encountering boat problems with the raft operations, the group of Waterloo engineers were amongst the team that built the greatest amount of ACROW and MGB for the times allotted. They were teamed up with engineers from Edmonton and Calgary, Alberta.
Chilliwack has hosted this annual exercise for over forty years with a current focus on training for domestic operations. This year saw engineers build bridges and rafts to train for flood mobility operations.
Students interested in joining the local Combat Engineers are encouraged to contact Warrant Officer Youden at 519-746-4565.
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