County prepares for disaster with collaborative drill

Emergency crews work scenario that involves 7.1 earthquake

Susan Schell

of the Gateway

It’s 8:30 a.m. in Gig Harbor. A 7.1 magnitude earthquake has just rocked the peninsula. There are massive landslides, bridge collapses, explosions, widespread power and water outages and tsunamis.

Are emergency response crews ready? They plan to be.

That was the scenario for this year’s “Shake and Quake” drill last Wednesday performed by the Pierce County Department of Emergency Management. The drill was coordinated with Gig Harbor’s Multi Agency Coordinating Council.

“This is the first time we’ve done an earthquake drill,” said Jonathan White, marketing director for Peninsula Light Co., a member of MACC. “This scenario put us out of our comfort zone. We pre-planned, hypothetically, a series of events that would happen during an earthquake.”

White said the MACC consists of “stakeholders,” entities within the community that would be most affected by, or called upon, to respond in a disaster situation.

The MACC also includes Gig Harbor Fire District 5, Key Peninsula Fire District 16, the City of Gig Harbor, Pierce County Public Works, the Gig Harbor Police Department, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, the Peninsula School District, the Washington Corrections Center for Women, Pierce County Emergency Management, Merrill Gardens and the Franciscan Health System.

The MACC meets monthly to coordinate its efforts and to discuss options for increasing safety and response times in the event of a disaster.

But Wednesday’s event went beyond that, as the MACC went through drills in conjunction with the county. Each entity sent a representative to the Emergency Operations Center on Bujacich Road in Gig Harbor.

“All the stakeholders have a disaster response plan,” White said. “There’s a need to test the plan on an annual basis.

“There are different types of tests,” he added. “A tabletop test is where you sit around and discuss it. Some of us did a full-scale exercise. Full scale means that you actually move people and you move resources.”

“This drill was county wide,” said Penny Hulse, Prevention Division Chief for Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One. “All of those people sat in a room and prioritized what would happen after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.”

“It’s just a matter of coordinating resources,” White said. “To bring in a collective of all these different stakeholders.”

The MACC met at 7 a.m. to begin the process of evaluating and putting together a plan of action, White said.

Dick Bower, building fire, safety and emergency management director for the City of Gig Harbor, said the city has conducted independent emergency drills with varying levels of complexity, but never with a worse-case scenario.

“We’ve done some bits and pieces, but this was the first time we’ve ever actually had the chance to test them,” Bower said. “It was a good learning experience for everybody from the ground up.”

Bower said the drill helped the city test its radio capabilities and pinpoint areas in the city which don’t have good radio capabilities.

“This is the first time the city has ever rallied to put together and stand up an emergency coordination center,” Bower said. “All in all, the message we’d like to put out is that this is a very successful collaboration between people all over the county.”

The employees at PenLight had a full-scale earthquake drill, complete with personnel being evacuated from the building. The power and water utility would be a key player in dealing with outages that likely would occur during a widespread disaster.

“The scenario was that our building was destroyed, and we couldn’t operate out of our facility,” White said. “We had to co-locate at the Fire District Emergency Operations Center. Then we dispatched our crews and engineering to figure out how to put the system back.

“We were able to review what works and what didn’t work, and how we can respond to disasters in the future,” he added.

White said it’s important for MACC entities to keep in contact with each other to make sure people have food, water, gas and transportation.

In a real disaster, some people probably would have to be moved to shelters.

“We want to make sure we’re not all operating just within our little silos,” White said. “And that we’re not just worried about our little domain. Our domain impacts everybody. We need to focus on opening main arterial roads, communication and power.”

During the drill, PenLight employees were moved to Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church in Gig Harbor.

“They did great,” White said. “The first thing you want to do is duck and cover. We evacuated the building according to our plan. We have an agreement with Chapel Hill that they will provide shelter to our employees and their families.

“We’re not going to get our employees to work if they can’t concentrate because they’re worried about their families,” he added.

Those involved with the drills said it was time well spent.

“We did accomplish everything we wanted to accomplish objective-wise,” Bower said. “Our future testing will come out of changes that we learned from this one. Eventually, we’ll no doubt get tested by reality.”