A set of emergency response exercises were recently held in the Mendenhall Wetlands State Game Refuge in Alaska, simulating a pair of plane crashes, according to The Juneau Empire. Intended to provide an opportunity for various first responders and emergency response groups to practice and demonstrate their skills, the exercise involved approximately 80 attendants, and focused on wide-area searches. With volunteers playing the roles of victims, an assortment of teams searched the wetlands to identify survivors and coordinate their medical treatment and extraction to the exercise’s command center in nearby Juneau.
“We basically have been working with search and rescue teams to increase our forward triage and our ability to go through an area quickly and find out what’s going on. We’ve been working with dog teams to take our wilderness dogs and our avalanche dogs and teach them how to find people in buildings that are collapsed or structures that lost or moved or difficult to work around,” said Tom Mattice, City and Borough of Juneau Emergency Programs Manager, of the exercises. “We’re working with our fire crews to give them the ability to stabilize buildings that have structural issues to be able to do penetrations and extractions that make the difference.”
The exercises were held as part of the statewide Alaska Shield event, intended to test the coordination of local, state, federal, and non-governmental agencies for emergency response, against a varying set of disasters.
Source:
https://www.juneauempire.com/news/preparing-for-calamity-city-hosts-disaster-response-training/
