White-Out Response Drill To Test Disaster Dispatching

Creative Commons via bay-of-fundie.com

On May 2-3, 2012, four disaster drills will take place between 9-1-1 at the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA) and 5 Fire Department Command Centers.  These drills are intended to evaluate how fire agencies will deal with calls of different priorities during an active and severe winter storm.   

Operation Whiteout will engage fire departments throughout Clark County in determining what level of response can be given to calls that typically fall into Priority 3-5 in the emergency response field.   

During any emergency situation, determining an agency’s ability to respond to calls at lesser priority levels can become easily overwhelmed.  This exercise will stress these systems in order to better refine countywide response plans related to disaster dispatching. 

This exercise will involve multiple locations with staged evaluators.  Evaluators will offer comments, which will be compiled in an After Action Report and Improvement Plan with recommendations for future training, equipment, and response procedures.

This exercise will NOT INVOLVE fire trucks or emergency response personnel actually responding to disaster scenes; however, there may be some heard radio traffic.  While we repeatedly encourage all exercise participants to say “THIS IS AN EXERCISE MESSAGE” before each radio transmission, we also realize that this may be inadvertently lost at certain times in the communications. 

Drills will conclude by 4:00 p.m. each day. 

Participating Agencies include

• Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA) – 911 Dispatch & Emergency Operations Center 
• Clark County Amateur Radio Emergency Services (CCARES)
• Clark County Fire and Rescue (CCFR)
• Camas Fire Department (CFD)
• East County Fire and Rescue (ECFR) 
• Clark County Fire District #3     
• Clark County Fire District #6    
•  Clark County Fire District #10    
• Clark County Fire District #13 
• Washougal Fire Department (WFD) 
• Vancouver Fire Department (VFD)

Exercises and drills prepare our emergency response agencies for the crisis scenarios that we could easily face in the future.  We hope that, as we drill, our residents will remember to practice their personal emergency plans and consider how prepared all of us are for the unthinkable.