Exercise en masse! An exercise with over 950 participants on three levels involving the County EOC, the City EOC, and a full scale field and hospital exercise. That's a large exercise.
That's what the City of Huntington Beach (HB), CA, along with the Department of Justice, did with a terrorism exercise on 5/23/01.
Other participants included the HB Fire, Police, Lifeguards and EOC personnel; FBI Hazardous Materials Team, National Guard Civil Support Team, State OES, Orange County Sheriff Bomb Squad, All Orange County Hazardous Materials Teams, the Orange County Health Care Agency and Orange County Sheriff Coroners.
Volunteers from the Community Emergency Response Team program (CERT), Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services (RACES), American Red Cross, Golden West College and local high schools had an important part in the exercise.
CERT volunteers participated as victims on the beach, moulaging and registering victims, at the hospitals as victims and working in the EOC as Message Runners, Mappers, Posters, and EOC Aids. CERT President, Cecil Wright, responded to the EOC as the CERT representative, coordinating requests for CERT responders.
RACES set up SSTV (amateur radio television) and sent live photos from the incident to the HB City EOC, the County EOC and the Command Post.
All together over 950 participants worked on the beach, in EOC's and at ten hospitals. Pictures were included in the July CERT newsletter. CERT Home page isourworld.compuserve.com/homepage/pburtis and the RACES home page is www.qsl.net/races-hb.
The above, and the following, is extracted from the HB CERT Newsletter of July 2001. "The HB RACES Chief Radio Officer (President) is Dr. Steve Graboff, an orthopedic surgeon in private practice in Huntington Beach. He was the Emergency Service Office's selection for volunteer of the month for May 2001." He has been "involved with medicine since he started volunteer work in a hospital emergency room as a teenager. He finds volunteer work is very rewarding and a great stress reliever and devotes many hours each week to RACES and CERT. He has been involved with RACES for over 4 years."
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