KAMLOOPS — Within minutes of the alarm sounding at Clearwater Secondary School, firefighters begin to arrive on scene.
It isn’t a real emergency, but crews have been instructed to treat it as one.
“The whole idea is to make the community safer, make our response better, and better serve the public,” said Mike Savage, Deputy Chief of Blackpool Fire Department.
The mock emergency is a carbon monoxide leak at the high school. While most of the students are evacuated safely, 17 remain inside.
“The 17 unaccounted for will require a full-on primary and secondary search of the school facility by firefighters to locate and rescue and remove the missing individuals as well as the initial response of shutting down the utilities, ventilating the building, and ensuring the safety of those occupants, the firefighters, the scene stabilization and getting the people out so they can be treated,” Savage said.
The exercise has been in the works since last December.
Image Credit: CFJC Today / Jill Sperling“It was just a topic that we had discussed between Blackpool and Clearwater Fire and looked at it as an area that hadn’t been done previously,” Savage said. “1993 was the last time we did a large-scale live mock exercise so it was time we get one going again and to pick out a recent topic such as carbon monoxide leaks.”
Clearwater Secondary School Principal Darren Coates says the school was happy to participate as it worked well with the current curriculum.
“We would typically never do this in a normal day because, as you can see, it’s super disruptive, but we’re running what we call Core Competency Week, so we’re not running regular scheduled classes,” Coates said.
The scenario will test all of the community’s emergency response crews, as well as the hospital, which is having to accomodate an influx of patients.
“It just gives us something to test everything, test the community, test all the emergency plans, and give it a scenario that actually stretches the resources to the absolute max.”
