Two Newspaper Town: The Drill

Yesterday the City of Boston and surrounding communities participated in their latest homeland security sponsored drill, Operation Poseidon. The details of the drill had been leaked released to the press a few weeks ago. We knew what would happen, when it would happen, and where. Local blogger Eeka took part in the drill as a volunteer victim and gives her own recount of the day

The simulation was very poorly done. We all had name tags listing our symptoms and our vital signs. We were instructed to act out what was on the tag and not to add anything else. There was no instruction though regarding whether we were supposed to otherwise behave as we would in a disaster, or what. So, when the bomb went off, all of the people who were "oriented" and "able to walk" ran out of the mall…

Being a two newspaper town, we had the benefit of hearing what the two dailies had to say about the incident. The Boston Herald painted an optimistic picture of the incident, as they often do

“(The drill) went smoothly,” said Officer Frank Pasquarello, a spokesman for Cambridge police. “I’d give it an 8.5 out of 10 for coordination.”

Officials from Homeland Security observed the exercise and will compile an after-action plan to assess the emergency response.

The Boston Globe will wait for that Department of Homeland Security before giving the operation high marks. Such drills are used to find the weak spots in the response effort. According to Mac Daniel's account there was room for improvement

Interviews with some of the 215 volunteer victims suggested that mistakes might have been made. The volunteers described passing rescue workers failing to ask them if they needed help, despite the index cards the volunteers wore indicating the seriousness of their condition: bleeding to death, radiation exposure, in shock. Other volunteers said officials were slow to bring buses to evacuate people fleeing the scene.

Good thing we train our local emergency response teams to avoid free cheese, beer, and peanut butter - watch out G.I. Joe - that's a German beer!. Hilarious pic of a new terror threat provided by Flickr user purpleslog's