Oakland County emergency management teams hold full-scale disaster exercise
ROCHESTER, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - Oakland County emergency management teams simulated a full-scale disaster exercise on Tuesday.
The full-scale disaster training involved multiple emergency agencies responding to the collapse of a six-story apartment building with an unknown number of people inside. Teams tested their safety skills, quick thinking, and how to save lives.
Simulated building collapses help emergency crews learn skills they hope they never have to use.
The daylong drill challenged first responders with a rope rescue, a confined space extrication and a tower rescue.
Ann Echoles said these exercises teach teams in front of and behind the scenes about communications, operations and logistics.
"Just working out the logistics of what kind of tools everyone has and how we work together as a team without ever having met before," said Echoles. "This is just a really important lesson to learn, especially with communications and things like that."
CBS News Detroit spoke with first responders who said Michigan is different than most states because of the number of agencies surrounding every county, especially Oakland County, where there are more than 60 emergency crews and 20 911 call centers to deal with disasters.
"Here's the problem with disasters; those of us that train for them want to use the skills we have acquired," said" Oakland County emergency management specialist Darin Page. "We want to use all the things we learned, but that means it is a very bad day for the community, so honestly, we are hoping we don't have to do what we train for."
Echoles said it's important these trainings take place every year if not more, to sharpen skills and prepare everyone in case of an emergency. She said the community needs to know this benefits them.
"It doesn't matter where you come from; everyone is going to show up and help, and we kind of figure out the logistics and those financial things on the back end," said Echoles. "There is not going to be a delay. We have mutual aid agreements in place already, so we are going to be able to respond right away and appropriately for the health and safety of the public."
Leaders of this exercise said they were motivated to do this because of the lessons learned from the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse in Florida.
