5 June 2008
Mock Disaster Tests Emergency Services
Kenora Ontario - Kenora's disaster preparedness was put to
the test Wednesday with a simulated chemical spill at the Canadian Pacific Rail yard.
A two-day scenario was packed into a three-hour timeline testing local fire, police, ambulance, and emergency
response teams.
In the scenario, a train collided with a dump truck parked on the track, derailing the cars and spilling diesel and anhydrous ammonia.
The ammonia cloud floated north of the tracks, towards Beaver Brae school.
Ambulances were called to the scene to handle victims, played by local high school students, fire services handled the leak along side
a hazardous materials team, police searched for the suspect and the emergency operations centre in Keewatin was called into action.
With a station for every service in town, the operations centre acts as command post during an emergency.
The idea behind the simulation is to test the city's services and flush out any gaps in the event of a real emergency.
"(Kenora did) excellent," said Donnie Day, president of Homeland Emergency Training, who organized the simulation. "It
is an exercise that every city should do, whether it be a table top or a full blown mockup like we did today and what it does is it
brings everybody together.
"It shows a lot of nit-picking things, it shows where we have holes."
Fire chief Warren Brinkman acted as chief commander in the operations centre, running plays and calling the shots to his men on the
ground.
More than 30 organizations participated in the simulation, bringing services that don't normally work together into that same scene.
Firemen communicating with police officers, ambulance drivers, and the police, while school board officials play out an evacuation.
The only serious issues to emerge were with communications, which Brinkman called a quick fix.
"There's a number of things, in my opinion, that are fixable and, in fact, they're overnight fixable," he said. "In
terms of any kind of catastrophic failure, I didn't see that."
A report will be compiled by all the services involved, laying out their failures and successes and will be presented to council within
a few months.
The important thing, Brinkman said, is all the services can work together in an organized way to keep the community safe and make
somebody's worst day the best it can be.
"Mrs. Smith, whose out there, she says you know what, somebody attended to my call for help," he said.
"It's my very worst day and I got somebody to come to my front door and say Mrs. Smith, you have to evacuate and we're taking you
out of here. Do you have any medication and any pets, we're taking you from your home and we're moving you over to an evacuation
centre."
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