Live training exercise improves coordination, communication and collaboration between Stratford emergency services

Stratford firefighters and police officers stabilize a toppled school bus before rescuing those inside during a simulated emergency exercise Oct. 23.

Nearly 100 local firefighters, police officers, paramedics, other emergency workers, city officials and volunteers participated in a live emergency training exercise in Stratford on Oct. 23, aimed at providing hands-on experience with a collaborative disaster-response effort.

Planned by Stratford deputy fire chief and community emergency management coordinator Richard “Andy” Anderson with the help of Calian Group, a Canadian company that provides health, training, engineering and IT services to private and public sector organizations, the day-long simulated exercise was designed to test the City of Stratford’s emergency response plans, and help those involved practice and prepare for real-life disasters.

Speaking with the Times before the exercise, Anderson said this particular exercise – the first live exercise undertaken by the city in the past 10-15 years – was meant to simulate a tornado touchdown across a section of Romeo Street South, making a direct impact at River Gardens Retirement Residence, strewing tree limbs and debris across the road, damaging passenger vehicles and toppling a school bus, and damaging key infrastructure like water and hydro.

“I’ve been working with (Calian Group),” Anderson said. “I’m the boots on the ground. I select the area, I select the type of exercise … and they build it in the background. … I’ve got actors for walking wounded, I’ve got a couple of vehicles we’re going to be able to turn over, so we have that live portion that brings this training to life.”

While volunteers from River Gardens and students from St. Michael Catholic Secondary school acted as victims with specific injuries, city officials and leadership from each of the city’s emergency services were stationed at an emergency operations centre at the Stratford Rotary Complex to lead and coordinate the ground response.

Throughout the morning and in the midst of pouring rain, emergency workers were directed to respond to car accidents, rescue those in danger and coordinate medical care for those with serious injuries. Other local agencies like Canadian Red Cross and Salvation Army were on hand to assist the victims, while tow trucks and city buses were available to move damaged vehicles and transport people to emergency shelters.

Following the live portion of the exercise, which closed Romeo Street South to traffic for most of the morning, the exercise was continued as a tabletop simulation back at the emergency operations centre, where officials coordinated the medium to long-term response to the tornado touchdown.

Speaking with the Times after the exercise, Anderson said the exercise was a complete success.

“I think it went extremely well,” he said. “Of course, there was a lot of coordination; a bus flipped over, two cars crashed, we brought tree limbs out onto the street. … Once we had all that placed and we said, ‘Ok, the exercise is starting,’ I can tell you … everything just fell into place exactly as I pictured it. We made no hiccups, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Police, fire and ambulance; they worked extremely well together. … For something this large, it was fantastic.

“One of the Calian guys was on the ground with me and he said, ‘I am hard-pressed to find anything wrong with what happened today.’”

There was a similar sentiment among the exercise’s other participants. Both Stratford police acting deputy chief Mark Taylor and Perth County Paramedic Services deputy operations chief Tristan Barter expressed how seamlessly each service and organization communicated and worked with one another, building a whole new level of confidence in the city’s emergency response and disaster-relief frameworks.

“Yesterday’s event allowed us to work with a more robust team of City of Stratford departments, ensuring seamless communication and resources when an event such as this arises,” Barter said. “The results of the exercise brought to light the importance of granular details in regards to communication and teamwork. The constituents of the City of Stratford can sleep soundly knowing that this team has the opportunity to practice and hone their skills even further in this area of emergency management.”

“It was excellent; well done,” Taylor added. “I’ve got to give kudos to Andy Anderson, who set it up. The work that was put into it; it’s pretty hard to make a training live event as real as possible, but I think he managed to pull it off. Every time we do a live event like this with so many different agencies, it’s a good opportunity for collaboration with other community services and partners. When you’re working with the paramedics and the fire and police on scene, and you’re dealing with the injured people, dealing with weather and so many different things, things can go wrong. … So, knowing we can get that unified command together and make decisions as a group instead of making them individually means everyone is making good decisions.”

Mayor Martin Ritsma also shared his insights from the training exercise with the Times, suggesting the live experience put those lessons learned through the city’s traditional tabletop emergency exercises into practice successfully.

With the amount of information coming into the operations centre during the exercise, Ritsma said city staff had the opportunity to test their ability to ensure the right information gets to the right people while keeping lines of communication open with the public.

“I am proud of the energy and seriousness that everyone brought to the event. Even though it was a live exercise, it felt like we were responding to a real-life situation,” Ritsma said. “I am confident that we could, as a municipality, respond to a real-life emergency situation; to provide safety and support during that time for our residents. That is the number one responsibility of a mayor and municipality, to ensure the safety of your residents and your workers.”

One initial lesson the mayor said the city will take away from this exercise is the need to consider how volunteers from the community can be rallied and coordinated to assist with disaster-relief efforts in the days that follow.