Battalion Benelux conducts fire safety refresher training at Zutendaal APS-2 site

ZUTENDAAL, Belgium - Fire is not your friend, and the team at the Zutendaal Army Prepositioned Stocks-2 worksite knows this very well. In conjunction with National Fire Safety Week, team members from Army Field Support Battalion-Benelux - along with fire safety specialists from U.S. Army Garrison Benelux's Directorate of Emergency Services - conducted classroom fire safety training and fire extinguisher training at the APS-2 site in Belgium.

Guy Vossen, a Belgian host nation employee with AFSBn-Benelux and the safety officer at the Zutendaal APS-2 worksite, organized the safety refresher training. He invited Roel Laugs, a fire prevention inspector from USAG Benelux Brunssum Directorate of Emergency Services, to assist with training.

"Being at a remote site here at Zutendaal, we rely on a contingency of U.S. Army Garrison Benelux personnel who are here to support us with fire and emergency services, most of them being host nation employees," said Claudia Chandler Reblora, the AFSBn-Benelux site director at APS-2 Zutendaal. "Mr. Laugs is a fire prevention officer assigned here at the site. When we need to collaborate on building inspections and fire safety training, etcetera - he's our go to guy."

Chandler Reblora said the Zutendaal APS-2 worksite is comprised of 1.4 million square meters of available cantonment, which includes 28 warehouses, outdoor parking and staging, plus maintenance bays and more.

"And we have about 200 people on our workforce [assigned to AFSBn-Benelux]; 170 of those are host nation. We absolutely must talk about safety every single day," she said.

The Zutendaal APS-2 worksite is dispersed over a large area so it's important to have the right relationships, right reaction times and right rapid response, if an emergency occurs, the site director said. The team is fortunate to have Laugs and Vossen at the site in support. They are both very professional and well trained.

"On my team, Guy [Vossen] is the authority on all the Belgian laws and regulations as it pertains to safety. He does the building inspections, he conducts our safety training, and he ensures there are safety booklets at each warehouse with cards in them that tell you what to do in certain situations," Chandler Reblora said.

"He is always coordinating some type of safety training, His next training, I think, is a risk management class, and we're doing winter drivers training now - not only from a garrison perspective - but Guy [Vossen] is doing some additional winter drivers training, as well," she said.

AFSBn-Benelux is one of four battalions assigned to the 405th Army Field Support Brigade. The battalion provides mission command of APS-2 operations at the Eygelshoven APS-2 worksite in the Netherlands and the Zutendaal site in Belgium. AFSBn-Benelux is charged with providing and coordinating receipt, transfer, storage and maintenance of APS-2 at the two sites and at locations, forward.

The Zutendaal APS-2 site maintains equipment designated for a sustainment brigade and separate reporting units, plus three operational projects, and encompasses 80,000 square meters of warehouse space in 28 warehouses as well as 500,000 square meters of outdoor storage.

The 405th AFSB is assigned to U.S. Army Sustainment Command and headquartered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. The brigade provides materiel enterprise support to U.S. forces throughout Europe and Africa - providing theater sustainment logistics; synchronizing acquisition, logistics and technology; and leveraging the U.S. Army Materiel Command materiel enterprise to support joint forces. For more information on the 405th AFSB, visit the official website and the official Facebook site.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.