The police were one of multiple agencies from Stark County and beyond that converged Tuesday to take part in a tabletop response exercise to a possible train derailment in Dickinson at the Public Safety Center.
“We’ve talked a lot about making sure that we’re capable of handling any emergency that might take place in the city of Dickinson,” he said.
Ron Bergh of Wenck Response Services lectured the exercise.
“The purpose of the exercises and the trainings is to help ... all the local agencies to evaluate policies and procedures,” Bergh said.
He said Wenck holds many tabletop and full-scale exercises for agencies in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.
Meetings like this help to illuminate what agencies might lack in terms of planning for disasters such as train derailments, Dassinger said. They work to instill the capability of making decisions under stress.
“It’s been a long time since the Dickinson agencies have come together like this, not just the city of Dickinson, but our mutual aid partners and other agencies,” said Dickinson Fire Chief Bob Sivak.
As Sivak explained, a tabletop exercise is done in the classroom, rather than the field.
“It’s basically talking through a real-world scenario,” Sivak said. “It’s a planning exercise.”
Officials from the Stark County Sheriff’s Office, the Dickinson Rural Fire Department, Dickinson Ambulance Service and Dickinson Public Works were all at the meeting, as were representatives from the Dickinson Catholic and Dickinson Public schools and individuals from private businesses located near the railroad tracks. Authorities from the Bismarck Fire Department were there as well, Sivak said, because Dickinson has a response agreement with them should Dickinson need backup.
Though there have been trainings like this one in the past, Sivak said repeating them is helpful since new faces always come into the response agencies. It helps those individuals to forge bonds with others, he said, and it tests the capabilities of an agency as a whole.
Plus, Sivak said, it’s not something they practice every day.
“It’s always a good refresher,” he said.
Sivak said this could lead to a full-scale exercise in the future should this event prove successful, which he said would be discussed with Bergh at the end.
Sherry Adams, director of the Southwestern District Health Unit, said one of the main benefits of gatherings such as this one was that participants could forge interagency relationships. It’s helpful to know who everyone is when an emergency does occur, she said.
Sandy Engeland, the deputy director of Stark County Emergency Management, agreed.
“Like they say, you don’t want to be handing out business cards at an incident,” Engeland said.
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