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Tabletop terror: Emergency responders discuss their plans
Local emergency responders met to discuss how they would handle terrorist activity and hazardous material leaks in a tabletop exercise Wednesday.
Bourbon County Emergency Manager Keith Jeffers organized the exercise, held at the Danny and Willa Ellis Family Fine Arts Center on the Fort Scott Community College campus, to discuss how each of the area emergency response teams would react in a situation in which there was terrorist activity at a local utility plant, resulting in the exposure of hazardous material.
"We're just trying to get everybody to understand that this is a possible event," he said. "We're not necessarily a target, but we need to be prepared for any eventualities."
The tabletop exercise is a way for response teams to evaluate their plans without having to foot the cost of full-scale drills, Jeffers said.
In addition, the exercise is being evaluated by the Kansas Department of Emergency Management and it was arranged to comply with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's exercise evaluation program.
"It's a low-cost way to work an exercise," Jeffers said. "The goal on this is just to get everybody thinking, to make sure their plans are correct, that they're up-to-date, and that they have it in their minds how they are going to respond."
The idea for the event discussed Wednesday came from a pack of scenarios provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Jeffers said he took the model and make it more personal by adding street names, buildings and other details specific to Fort Scott and Bourbon County.
"Most of the time, those are made for a fictitious city, fictitious county, fictitious state," Jeffers said. "But when we actually take it and make it our own ... it makes it real for our responders."
Fort Scott Fire Chief Paul Ballou, one of the participants in Wednesday's exercise, said attending trainings like the one organized here is beneficial because it helps give those attending an idea of areas of the community that would be more vulnerable to an attack of some kind, or an accident with catastrophic consequences.
"It just gives you that much more training in the event that something is caused by someone, or we have an actual accident," Ballou said. "We'll take this back and let (the firefighters) go through the scenario," "It's always interesting to see ... Each crew has a little different outlook on it."
In addition, Ballou said the exercises often point out areas where an agency or organization's emergency response and management plan are lacking and need a bit of fine tuning.
"There's always things that come up that you may not have thought of," he said.
Bourbon County Commissioner Harold Coleman viewed the exercise in a different light. He said the information presented helped him better understand what the Bourbon County Commission's role would be in a disaster.
With federal money potentially available to offset some of the cost of a disaster, the county will still be responsible for paying the bill -- or at least a portion.
"It's going to be our resources and we're going to have to finance part of it," Coleman said. "We need to have an involvement and know what's going on."