Exercise provides valuable lessons

Thursday October 21, 2010

Responding to disaster is never easy, however emergency management staff in the Bay of Plenty are now more practised and prepared after participating in the national Exercise Tangaroa on Wednesday.

Bay of Plenty Civil Defence Emergency Management Group (CDEM) Group Controller Warwick Murray said the exercise provided an opportunity for Emergency Coordination Centre staff to increase their familiarity with both their role and with the running of an emergency centre.

“We acknowledge that there is always room for improvement when it comes to Civil Defence response, however it really showed how far we have come in the two years since the last national exercise, Exercise Ruamoko,” Mr Murray said.

He said people often forget that the roles emergency centre staff take on in an event are often different to their day to day work.

“So yes, while we do take part in specific training and carry out exercises such as yesterday’s, we’re often asking people to do jobs that aren’t what they do on a daily basis. With that in mind, we think we did pretty well.”

Mr Murray said the choice of event, in this case a tsunami, was timely given the recent release of the Tsunami Inundation Maps for the region.

“The maps were an incredibly useful tool for both the regional and local responders in helping inform us. It also gave our Local Emergency Operations Centres the opportunity to look at, use and test some of the work they had been doing around evacuation planning.”

While the major national exercise was held on Wednesday, some staff will continue to take part in the exercise for the rest of the week, as different areas of Civil Defence response are tested.

“Overall, we’re confident that if the tsunami modelled in the exercise was to actually occur tomorrow we’d have a decent response.”

For more information about how to get prepared for emergencies, and to sign up for Bay of Plenty Civil Defence updates, visit www.bopcivildefence.govt.nz