Lakeport — Imagine schools reporting many unusual absences, hospitals reporting large numbers of incoming patients and emergency rooms flooded with people complaining of similar symptoms. This was the imaginary scenario set Thursday at an emergency response exercise held in Lakeport.
Joining together to participate in the preparedness exercise, held at the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Lakeport, were the Redwood Regional Counties of Lake, Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Napa, Solano and Sonoma.
Officially called the “Point of Distribution Strategic National Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Exercise,” the drill was created to address the possibility of a large-scale public health emergency in which multiple counties would participate to ensure readiness, test communications and response time.
This is important because in previous years preparedness grants have focused on each county developing individual emergency preparedness plans. Now, however, grant funding for this year and subsequent years will focus more on standardized regional emergency preparedness plans.
During the opening ceremony of Lake County”s first attempt at a regional exercise, Lake County Health Services liaison officer Tricia Austin said, “Look at Hurricane Katrina. Did it affect a county? It affected a nation.”
Lake County acted as the primary affected county whose residents became “ill” after a species of salmonella was transformed in a bioterrorism fashion (mutated) and “transmitted” to them.
Bioterrorism coordinator for the Office of Preparedness, Gary Williamson, said, “We have to practice to make things happen. We will make mistakes today and we will learn from them and do it better next time.”
Lakeport Chief of Police Kevin Burke, acting as the exercise”s site incident commander, told the approximately 220 participants, “I hope everybody here makes mistakes today because it”s exercises like this where we can learn from our mistakes.”
He then directed the participants to, “Look around ? these are the people you”ll be working with if a disaster occurs.”
Lessons already learned from last year”s single-county exercise, held on Oct. 13, included the need to improve signage, increasing security, and improving radio contact and emergency communications.
“This exercise is unique because not a lot of other counties are doing this,” said Lake County Health Services Public Information Officer Mark Messner. “We are somewhat ahead of the curve.”
Contact Cynthia Davis at cdavis@record-bee.com.
