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A meth lab will be discovered off the shore of Port Washington today amid “tornadoes and floods, chemical spills and earthquake evacuees, cyber attacks on the power grid and a suspicious vessel off the Lake Michigan shoreline,” according to a press release from the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs, which adds, “Thank goodness it’s only an exercise.”

Welcome to Operation Vigilant Guard ’11, a training operation in the works since 2009 that will have 3000 participants from 48 federal, state, county, volunteer and private agencies – mostly from Midwestern states – responding to complex mock emergencies this week.

The operation began Saturday with an abandoned tanker truck leaking an unknown substance in Jefferson County. On Monday, tornadoes at a chemical plant in LaCrosse were battled 58 miles east at Volk Field near Camp Douglas. On Wednesday, the UW Parkside campus was the site of a hazardous material spill running

Lake Guardian at port (photo by Michael Horne)

from 2 to 11 p.m. that might have tied up traffic on the highways, the planners had predicted.

We are not in Kansas anymore but in the fantasy world of the National Guard, which is coordinating the event and its accompanying maelstroms. These comprehensive full-scale drills held four times a year in different parts of the country can bend many levels of reality to enhance training and response, including the equivalent of hoisting a skull-and-crossbones standard atop a research vessel which normally carries biologists, not pseudo narco-terrorists.

According to the Guard, “The purpose of the exercise, which calls for multiple disaster scenarios in different communities, is to assess the Wisconsin National Guard’s ability to assist state and local agencies in response, coordination and collaboration to several emergencies. It also allows local and state emergency providers an opportunity to participate in a major full-scale exercise, to identify strengths and weaknesses in current emergency plans and procedures.”

National Guard servicemen scan a pile of rubble during Monday’s tornado exercise at Volk Field. (photo by National Guard)

One measure of the powers of creation held by the National Guard has to deal with that mysterious research vessel-turned-meth lab. The vessel is to drop off some drug runners on Jones Island around 9 a.m. before heading north along the shoreline. There, a mighty surveillance plane borrowed from the Department of Natural Resources will follow her as the meth-smuggling vessel heads to Port Washington, site of the nation’s first artificial harbor, as it happens, where a small boat will depart from the mother ship and head to an abandoned car dealership/meth lab on the shore of the Ozaukee County seat.

Spoiler alert – SWAT teams from Port Washington and Milwaukee will be on hand to take out the drug runners and gain custody of the drug-running ship.

By mid-afternoon, it will be a wrap, and the ship can resume its usual guise, that of the Lake Guardian, a mild-mannered 160-foot Environmental Protection Agency ship that is the largest research vessel on the Great Lakes and which makes its home among the coal piles and oil storage tanks of the Port of Milwaukee, where there is nary a meth lab, or drug runner, in sight.  If those drug running troops disgorged from the floating meth lab happen to find their way through the wilds of Jones Island to the Harbor Room tavern, just west of the Lake Guardian’s Greenfield Avenue dock, well, we won’t ask and we won’t tell.

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