Exercise “In-Sink” makes a big splash
April 24th, 2009 by Jared Serviss
What started out a year ago as a regular exercise for Calgary Water Services turned into a large scale City testing of emergency response procedures yesterday. Exercise “In-Sink” saw around 300 people from Water Resources, Water Services, Fire, Police, Disaster Social Services, Communications, Roads, 311 and many others come together to test their various plans.
When Water Services began planning this exercise a year ago, we soon got interest from other business units and were asked to include them/expand it to a larger scope. This culminated yesterday with the following: Municipal Emergency Operations centre active; Emergency Water Operations Centre (H2OC) active and staffed with nearly 20 people; water simulation team active; water site active (20 people) to set up water tubes and sandbags; reception centre active (full scale with 11 teams on site); staging area active (with nearly 100 people posing as evacuees to bus to the reception centre for intake).
This exercise tested communications between the various centres/sites and led to many great points to move forward with to enhance our respective plans. Being site manager was especially fun as crews were not informed it was an exercise until they arrived on-site.
I would like to extend a big thank-you and congratulations to all involved as it was a great exercise!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.