Emergency Exercise Recap

Oakland Citywide Emergency Exercise 2012

This weekend’s emergency preparedness exercise gave our neighborhood an opportunity to practice the fundamental procedures for managing emergencies in our neighborhood.

Our group successfully at established a command command center to serve as the central point for communications, registering volunteers, assigning them to response teams. In addition neighbors who were not able to volunteer, were able to check in to help us know whether or not they were affected by the simulated 6.5 earthquake and aftershock.

Many thanks goes to our volunteers, Ron Woo, Curtis Crum, Shelly Linton, Kara Nielsen, Ed Carpenter, Dennis Rowcliffe, Hazel Jones (Fleming Ave.), and Leighton Linton for their work, managing our two-way radio communications, surveying the neighborhood to provide damage

assessment reports, and performing search and rescue operations.

Thanks also to Tracy Black, Emily Wilhite, Janice Crum and Julius Gaines, Patrick McMahon and Bing Yee, for their assistance in preparing for the event.

City of Oakland Fire department, Station 17, sent fire fighters to assist in our training. The provided explanations of what types of information they would need from us, how they would deal with some of the incidents we encountered, and how the fire station could help our neighborhood communicate with the Oakland Office of Emergency Services.

City of Oakland Fire department, Station 17, sent fire fighters to assist in our training. The provided explanations of what types of information they would need from us, how they would deal with some of the incidents we encountered, and how the fire station could help our

neighborhood communicate with the Oakland Office of Emergency Services.

The exercise helped us evaluate our level of readiness to deal with real emergencies. While carrying out the activities described in simulated incidents, we were able to identify several areas where we need to enhance our access tools, supplies and the availability of resources

which may already exist within our neighborhood.

Ron Woo and Leighton Linton attended the city's exercise debrief session, held shortly after the conclusion of the drill. Representatives from the roughly forty neighborhood groups which participated in the event discussed their experiences from the exercise, and shared best practices for handling the challenges residents may be faced with in a real emergency. The clear consensus among the groups, was that neighborhood groups will greatly benefit form additional training.