I was recently offered an opportunity to attend the Canadian Emergency Management College in Ottawa. I met many people, including a former club-mate whom I had not seen in 15 years, and experienced the stress of providing communication during a simulated disaster.
I was informed that the site was a former convent which has replaced the “Emergency Preparedness College” in Arnprior as Canada’s emergency training centre.
There were three areas of operation: the simulation room (from which the instructors fed information to the ”emergency responders”regarding what was said to be happening), the site (the simulated incident site, where the incident was said to be taking place) and the Emergency Operations Centre (where students acted as police chief, fire chief, etc. and plans were made). Students were first-responders representing police, fire, social services, transportation, community-works, etc. departments from across Canada. The mayor’s position was filled by an actual mayor from the Sudbury area. College staff played the roles of reporters, contractors, etc. Press conferences and news reports were prerecorded and played over the closed-circuit televisions.
It was my role, as one of nine amateur radio operators, to provide communication for all three sites (in 3 different exercises). The college provided my room , meals and traveling expenses. I helped to pass messages to and from emergency responders from all over Canada who were there to learn how to operate under the pressure of an emergency situation.
Each of the three rooms contained a large map on a central table. Round discs represented resources that were being deployed. A camera over the map-table in the simulation room was broadcast to the simulated incident site on closed-circuit tv. Desks were situated around the perimeter of the room for each service. Each desk had a designation plate (example, “police”} and a site map of the incident site on the wall. Most desks had a telephone.
(During the final exercise the phones were cut off which forced all communication to be handled through amateur radio simplex transmissions.)
As well as using amateur radio to replace phone transmission of information, it was used in all three exercises to provide a flow of information from the simulation room to the other sites in order to control the flow of the exercise (example: “phone service goes down”).
Each room contained a fax machine for simulation of digital messages. The amateur radio operators at each site numbered, logged, sent and received all faxed messages.
I enjoyed the experience, learned much and hope that I will be able to return to gain more experience in the future. ... Bill(VA3WOW)
