FIU stages largest disaster drill in the state
MIAMI - It's one of South Florida's biggest practice drills for an actual disaster.
"The hurricane is called Hurricane Marsha and it hit the DR (Dominican Republic,), it could have hit South Florida," said Ruben Almagur, director of Florida International University's Academy for International Disaster Preparedness.
FIU has a Master's Degree program in Disaster Management. Part of that is the four-day "disaster field course" exercise which is staged at the Roz and Calk Covens Conference Center in North Miami. The disaster is a real-life simulation of a category 5 hurricane in the Caribbean.
During the exercise, Master's candidate students are tasked with organizing a response filled with local, national, and international experts as well as resources such as helicopter aerial views and also experts providing real-time analysis of situations in disaster relief response.
"There's no smoke and mirrors, they're eating MREs, using a porta potty, not sleeping, it's raining, this is a real-life disaster environment," said Almagur.
He said this has become one of the largest disaster simulations in the state to help in a disaster abroad as well as close to home.
"If this was another Hurricane Andrew in Homestead, you could have 10 of these. There's never enough capacity to house people, feed people, to have fuel, to be able to have first responders and the community response," said Almagur.
He said the base camp they established was very similar to what was set up in the Fort Myers area after Hurricane Ian. Similarly, there are several agencies including FEMA, the Coast Guard, Miami Fire Rescue, and nonprofit groups such as Food for the Poor and Global Empowerment Mission taking part.
"We're getting a chance to work with everyone in a simulated scenario so that we can make relationships so that we can understand what we need to do better," said Patrick Lynch with Global Empowerment Mission.
"So there's a lot of things that we built into the exercise. Generators are going to fail. Someone is going to get hurt, we may have to medically evaluate someone out of here. W have people that were supposed to show up with food and supplies for the community they don't show up," said Almagur.
The students take part in planning this exercise to complete their course while the professionals use it as another tool to prepare for the real thing.
FIU's disaster simulation is now in its 8th year and has tripled in size as far as the number of agencies participating.