In this case, the 100 ‘residents’ who descended on the new Corpus Christi Secondary School in Burlington Nov. 13 were actually students of the school — volunteer actors helping with Halton Region’s 2008 annual emergency exercise.

Dubbed Exercise Longhorn — the school teams’ nickname — the response to a simulated evacuation was staged over five hours involving a multitude of regional and municipal agencies.

The ‘incident’ that prompted putting the region’s emergency response plan into action was a pretend train derailment in Milton that involved cars loaded with potentially-caustic anhydrous ammonia. Homes in the vicinity were to be evacuated with the school acting as the community-based emergency centre for injured and displaced victims and emergency planning personnel alike.

The exercise, carried out on an annual basis and many months in the planning, provides an opportunity to test emergency plans and identify areas for improvements. It gives the region and its partners an opportunity to practise their emergency response capabilities in a controlled environment.

About 250 people were involved in this year’s exercise. Fifty members of the region and police and fire departments were based out of the emergency operations command centre at regional headquarters in Oakville; the rest were at Corpus Christi, located on Upper Middle Road, just east of Appleby Line, at the makeshift evacuation centre.

Various agencies had representation in the simulation, including members of Halton police, Halton Catholic District School Board, Canadian Red Cross, The Salvation Army, St. John Ambulance, the City of Burlington, Towns of Halton Hills, Milton, Oakville, and the Halton Region Emergency Communications Team (amateur HAM radio operators).

‘Residents’ and people from a number of agencies and in a variety of emergency services uniforms moved about the evacuation centre. While evacuees were registered and the injured cared for and fed, the agency reps huddled, compared notes and decided what needed to be done, when, where and by whom.

It all went smoothly, according to one of the on-site co-ordinators.

“Everyone seems to understand their roles and responsibilities,” said Nick Buczynsky, community emergency management co-ordinator for Halton Region. “We start finding (out) very quickly that we need more people for certain functions.”

The most time-consuming task, he said, is initial contact with an evacuee and getting them registered and their needs assessed.

“It’s all manual labour, (filling out) the forms,” Buczynsky said of the process. “Those are our major bottlenecks. That is why we are doing this, to make it work better.”

The Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act requires municipalities, provincial ministries and designated agencies, boards, commissions and other branches of government to develop and implement emergency management programs.

Previous emergency exercises in Halton have addressed various scenarios: flooding (2003), hazardous materials and mass casualties (2004), pandemic influenza (2005), water system disruption (2006) and critical infrastructure disruption (2007).

One of the student volunteers said the scope of the simulation surprised her.

“It was a good experience, just to know what would actually happen,” said Rachel Headley, a Grade 10 student at Corpus Christi, who volunteered through her drama class. She portrayed an evacuee annoyed at being forced from her home, which was being renovated.

“I’m surprised by the number of people who are here. I learned many things, about what would happen and how people react toward it,” she said.

Stan Gajewski, the principal at Corpus Christi, said parents were informed in advance of the simulation so no one would think an actual emergency existed at the school.

Buczynsky said a briefing would take place immediately after the exercise to go over the day’s events. An evaluation report will be sent at a later date by the region to all of the participating agencies.

For more information on Halton’s Emergency Management Program, visit www.halton.ca/beprepared .

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A new aspect of the emergency response exercise this year was the Community Emergency Notification Service (CENS), a one-year pilot project in Halton.

CENS is an automated telephone system capable of sending out important information to residents during an emergency. A message is recorded by emergency response officials and delivered to all household and business phones within a designated geographical area, providing information and instructions.

On the day of the emergency simulation about 500 households in Ward 4 in Halton Hills were to receive an automated telephone message about the new notification service. The households had been notified in advance.