Contact(s)
Emergency Management
Community Exercises
What is a Community Excercise?
A community exercise is the primary way to test and evaluate the components of the Regional and Municipal Emergency Response Plans to determine whether they will work in an actual emergency.
Why have a Community Exercise?
- Test the functionality of the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and the Regional and Municipal Emergency Response Plans
- Improve inter-agency communications, cooperation and collaboration
- Learn and practice using emergency event management software
- Meet the requirements of the Emergency Management Act
- Build skills and confidence of staff and volunteers, by training them in their emergency management roles.
How frequent do the Community Exercises take place?
The Emergency Management Act requires each municipality in Ontario to host at least one exercise per year.
Examples of Community Exercises:
The Region of Waterloo has held the following exercise scenarios in collaboration with various area municipalities:
1992 - "Exercise Blue Jay"
Tornado scenario with many municipalities including the City of Waterloo.
1995 - "Exercise Frosbite"
Major Winter Storm with train derailment scenario in Breslau, including hazardous chemicals.
1998 - "Exercise Download"
Severe winter storm with a major hydro outage in Kitchener and Woolwich scenario.
2004 - "Exercise Swansong"
Pipe explosion in Ayr, in collaboration with Enbridge scenario.
2005 - "Exercise On-Ice"
Roof collapse at a Wilmot arena during winter storm scenario, first excercise using emergency event situation software (WebEOC).
The City of Cambridge has held the following exercise scenarios in collaboration with their community partners:
2004 - "Exercise Twister"
This exercise involved testing of Cambridge's Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and participation of the Community Control Group and support agencies during a tabletop (simulated) tornado in the City of Cambridge.
2005 - "Exercise Recovery"
This exercise involved a detailed review and assessment of the Recovery Plan component of the municipal Emergency Response Plan for the aftermath of Exercise Twister by the Community Cntrol Group and Support Agencies.
2006 - "Exercise Media"
This planned exercise in the fall of 2006 will test the public information and media related components of the Emergency Response Plan.
