By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
Planning for a large-scale emergency can be a daunting task.
And while things can go wrong in any disaster, when it comes to a city-wide catastrophe having unprepared agencies can quickly make a bad situation worse.
In an effort to ensure area agencies are prepared for such an emergency, in March, Hays will host a full-scale exercise simulating a direct tornado strike to the city.
“We don't like to think about those things happening,” said Ellis County Emergency Manager Lyle Pantle, “but we need to be prepared.”
“In coordination with the statewide tornado drill, we're going to simulate a tornado strike in Hays,” he said.
The event will include key players tasked with assisting area residents in an emergency affecting the entire city.
“There's going to be emergency management, St. Francis Ministries, Midwest Energy, a lot of civic organizations, police, fire, EMS, the typical people, the hospital and water resources,” Pantle said. “We'll all be involved in this.”
The training allows those organizations to determine if their policies and procedures meet their capabilities, he said.
“It will be an opportunity for them to say whether or not they can do what they say they can do,” Pantle said. “And if they can't, they can revise their plans or change their capability scope and make it so they can do what they say they need to do.”
Sequencing the response correctly is also a significant part of the training.
“The part that we're going to try and avoid is the, ‘Well, what do we do now?' ” Pantle said. “We want to know, OK, this has happened. Here's our next step. Here's what we need to be looking at in three hours. Here's where we need to be at in six hours. Here's where we need to be at in three days, three weeks — because it's going to be a long process.”
Along with departments and organizations testing their abilities and limits, the event helps the separate groups learn to work together, allowing for a better response if an emergency occurs.
“This is very important because, on a day-to-day basis, you don't really converse or work alongside these organizations,” Pantle said. “It's really only in the times of disaster that we see each other. And that makes it ever so more important that we understand each other's capabilities when it comes to disasters.”
Should that city-wide emergency occur, he said that training exercises like this one helps keep responders from being caught off-guard. But organizing a city-wide exercise takes a significant among of prep and planning.
“We try and invite as many people to the table that we think are going to be what we'll call a player or not,” Pantle said. “And we will have meetings with them.”
Meetings for the March training have already begun, he said.
“We're having a meeting every other month until the day of the exercise, and then we'll have one more after, to do a formal after-action review,” Pantle said. “We try and get as many of them there as possible. They're obviously going to have a point person within each department who's kind of our go-to for communication, but then within each department, they're going to have their own people that do the portions that they need to take care of.”
In those meetings, table-top exercises help hone agency responses simulated during the full-scale event.
Those meetings, Pantle said, help tune with outside agency policies and procedures with the exercise.
“This is a 12-month planning process, if not longer sometimes,” he said.
During that planning, the locations and scope of the exercise will also be determined.
He said the department would release details as the event approaches to prepare area residents that the training may impact.
“We don't want to catch anybody off guard,” Pantle said. “We want everybody to know when it's taking place so they can plan their day accordingly. … There will be some roads shut down. And there will be things that people don't normally see going on. And we don't want to frighten anybody. It's just an exercise. It’s just planning. So be looking for that information printed out in the future.”
While he works to keep impacts on the public at a minimum, the event he said is a vital part of emergency planning.
“It's going to give our community an opportunity to plan for something that we hope never happens,” Pantle said.
Cover image courtesy Pixabay