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Sacramento Exercise Highlights Use of Volunteer Responders in Disasters


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September 17, 2008 By

Photo: Volunteers from throughout California drill water rescue in simulated Folsom Dam collapse. (Credit: Gail Gallegos)

According to the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, the Sacramento area faces an unacceptably high risk of flooding. In the event of a large-scale flood, first responders may become overwhelmed with response and recovery missions and may even be prevented from accessing certain areas due to flooded roads and other obstacles. This makes trained volunteers a critical part of the emergency response system.

To that end, an exercise conducted on September 13th, 2008 gave volunteer community emergency response teams a chance to work together in responding to a large-scale simulated disaster. "We had CERT members-and then we had highly trained CERT members. Then we had CERT members that were brand-new-just trained yesterday," Geoff Winford, Sacramento regional Community Emergency Response Team coordinator and logistics coordinator for Saturday's exercise.

The scenario included the bursting of the Folsom Dam with a number of "victims" trapped on land and near water for several hours.

"We knew that this was one category we had not covered in water rescue and in large field situations like that. That's why we designed this whole event around this category," Winford said. "We've done collapsed buildings and large things like that before, but we've never done one in the field like this."


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