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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Remember, We Live On A Fault Line


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. 

If you have any questions about the exercise, please email me at judywatanabe@utah.gov.
 

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