County participates in disaster scenario
On Thursday, June 9, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Cascadia fault off the coast of Oregon and Washington, causing a tsunami with waves reaching 40 feet tall.
The waves pummeled the coast, causing the coastal population to flee inland. Emergency agencies in three states and parts of southern Canada quickly scrambled into place to deal with the situation, an attempt to keep panic and casualties at a minimum while preparing regions such as northern Idaho for an influx of displaced refugees.
Kind of scary to think about.
But that was a scenario local emergency agencies took part in Thursday, part of a FEMA exercise called “Cascadia Rising,” a four-day multi-state readiness program designed to help states affected by such an incident to work together and maximize their effectiveness.
“June 9 was the first time Boundary County has ever activated and operated an Emergency Operations Center,” said Mike Meier, Boundary County Public Information Officer said in a statement. “Most of the participants involved in the operation were somewhat concerned as to how it would go, would we know what to do and could we get it done in a timely fashion.”
Dave Kramer, Director of Boundary County Office of Emergency Management, said the exercise was a great learning experience for all involved.
“It was a great training opportunity for our county and some of the first responders that participated,” Kramer said. “It was a great way to practice if you have an incident that affects multiple states, their resources and how they come together.”
The Cascadia subduction zone (also referred to as the Cascadia fault) is a convergent plate boundary that stretches from northern Vancouver Island to northern California. It is thought by many experts to be a greater concern than even the San Andreas fault in California, simply because of the great length of the fault.
Since the County does not have a dedicated Emergency Operations Center, it was decided the Search and Rescue Building downstream from the Fairgrounds would be the location for operations. The disaster scenario which was the exercise for this event promised difficulties which the personnel working the Emergency Operations Center had to solve.
“For this exercise, the northern counties of Idaho were asked to participate, all at different levels,” Kramer said. “For our county, we decided to set up an Emergency Operations Center, something we typically haven’t done for lack of manpower and the fact that such an operation is used for long extended events. So this was a good training exercise, they gave us a few catch-all situational problems we would have to work through, things like how to delegate and come up with solutions.”
These situational problems included traffic backed up for miles on Highway 95 due to refugees from the devastated coast, including the Long Bridge in Sandpoint being closed, gasoline, hotel accommodations and food shortages to deal with and Boundary Community Hospital receiving elderly patients from a Seattle Nursing Home, filling the Hospital with other emergencies already in progress. Red Cross Shelters were set up at the schools, National Guard Armory and fairgrounds with 900 beds available for those who could travel further, according to the release. Pet shelters were filled to the max with request to the public to help. With all of the hypothetical chaos, Kramer was pleased with the results.
“The hospital did well, they did a full-scale exercise in conjunction with us,” Kramer said. “Overall, we were very pleased, we had some great volunteers at the Emergency Operations Center. From my standpoint, it went very well. It was good teamwork, people working together to improve and develop additional skills. It was a very positive experience.”