Ten Days of Drills Polish Pennsylvania Disaster Readiness
May 13--CARLISLE -- How would the county respond if a natural disaster struck?
Emergency responders from across the Midstate are working together this week to answer that question and prepare for the worst during an exercise dubbed "Wide Vigilance."
In coordination with the South Central Task Force, an emergency preparedness group made up of eight counties -- Adams, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon, Perry and York counties -- emergency responders began the bi-yearly exercises on Saturday. The 10-day drill focuses on response to emergencies too large for any one community to handle.
"This is a large-scale, 10-day Broadway production," said Duane Hagelgans, task force spokesman. "During a Broadway show, however, you don't want things to go wrong. Here we are testing all the systems to see what goes wrong."
On Monday, Cumberland County Department of Public Safety's emergency operations center ran a drill to review policies on how it would handle the collapse of a hospital due to a natural disaster.
The operations center had to come up with a plan to properly use ambulances and other resources to transport patients to neighboring hospitals while leaving enough available to respond to other emergencies during a mock hurricane.
These drills are vital to the preparedness of the center, and allow first responders to practice their needed skills. For some, this was practicing keeping the public properly informed during the disaster. For others, it was practicing a live extraction from a collapsed building.
"We can write plans all day long, but if you don't put them into action, you can't identify the strengths and weaknesses," said Megan Silverstrim, spokeswoman for the Cumberland County Department of Public Safety. "You don't want to be identifying the strengths and weaknesses of a plan in the middle of an actual emergency."
Silverstrim said the Department of Public Safety runs preparedness drills two to three times a month, ranging from round-table discussions to full-scale emergency drills.
Along with local first responders and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, members of the Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Puerto Rico National Guard participated in this week's drills as part of the National Guard's Vigilant Guard program. The National Guard will continue training at Fort Indiantown Gap National Guard Training Center through Friday.
"You can never be too prepared ... the last thing you want to do is meet someone new at a disaster," Hagelgans said, emphasizing the importance of bringing all the groups together for these drills.
Following the drills, which will end Sunday with an active shooter drill at the Park City Mall in Lancaster, members of the task force will develop an after-action report to evaluate what worked and what didn't in hopes of being better prepared if or when a real emergency happens.
Copyright 2014 - The Sentinel, Carlisle, Pa.
