The
State is busy planning our Utah Shakeout exercise to be held on April 18, 2013.
The day before the exercise, we, along with nearly 1 million of our closest
friends, will practice Drop, Cover and Hold On in the State’s largest
earthquake drill. We decided to separate these two events to allow more time
for our public outreach and drill activities.
This
year’s exercise scenario begins where we concluded last year, 24 hours after a
7.0 earthquake along the
Wasatch Front. The start time of the exercise will be event +24 hours. This
will allow us to further our practice of mission assignments, resource
allocation and information sharing. We are looking forward to testing our EOC
operations and ensuring that we are able to efficiently manage the requests for
resources and information. We will coordinate our efforts with FEMA and
exercise how we request resources through the Action Request Form (ARF)
process.
We
will also practice the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) to ensure
we can get people here, from other states, when we need them.
Our
State Emergency Response Team (SERT) and Division of Emergency Management (DEM)
staff have been regularly attending monthly meetings and practicing our
activation responsibilities. Web EOC has been upgraded and new tools allow us
more coordination and better information. We have looked at the lessons learned
from last year’s exercise and tried to build on those identified areas of
needed improvement. Each year we learn something new and work to improve our
operation.
Kris
Repp, Kevin Holman and Matt Beaudry have worked diligently on this exercise to
make it very productive. Their extra efforts in making sure every detail is
handled will lead us to a successful exercise.
We
also have our partners, who are subject matter experts, writing injects. This
will make our exercise content very realistic and our capabilities adequately
tested.
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