Deep River / Laurentian Hills
Nuclear Emergency Plan Exercise
18
Oct 2007
On
Oct. 18th, there was a full exercise of the Laurentian Hills / Deep
River Nuclear Emergency Plan. There were 7 centres in operation
excluding AECL itself. Renfrew County West ARES provided backup
communications for 5 of the centres. We had voice and packet with
Outpost on VHF at 4 centres: the Municipal Emergency Operations Centre,
MEOC, in Pt. Alexander the Emergency Information Centre, EIC, also in
Pt. Alexander, the Reception Centre, REC, in Deep River, and the
Evacuation Centre, EVAC, in Deep River. We had VHF voice only at the
Red Cross in Pembroke. We also had HF at the MEOC. This was the first
exercise that we used Outpost for packet. We had a total of 15 ARES
members at the various sites.
The
scenario started at 0900 with the
assumtion that the callout had been made hours earlier and the centres
had been set up. This was a bit of a challenge for us as the buildings
didn't open until 0830, and in the REC centre, the equipment couldn't
be accessed until after 0900. All centres were operational in a
reasonable time.
The
scenario did not include a failure of normal
communications, so the players were asked to pass some of their
messages through ARES. Consequently, we weren't overloaded with
messages, but we had enough to test our communications. It turned out
that a lot of the messages were passed to and from the Red Cross in
Pembroke. We wished we had had the resources to have a packet station
there. The packet systems running Outpost worked very well. The
exercise provided an opportunity for many of our ARES members to
experience packet operations for the first time. Some were surprised
how simple communications were with Outpost. The exercise players were
impressed by the timing and quality of the messages they received. We
received an email from the Red Cross with some very favourable words.
One
message was passed and communications were maintained throughout the
exercise between the MEOC and PEOC on 3742 KHz. |
