City of Winnipeg learns through exercise

WINNIPEG - May 23, 2007- The City of Winnipeg emergency preparedness exercise, dubbed exercise West Wind, met its goal today in testing the City's emergency preparedness and response capabilities. The City learned a great deal in terms of both what worked well and key areas for improvement.

While most aspects of the exercise played out extremely well, the event emphasized the need to improve systems to provide timely information to media on scene in the event of a real life disaster situation like this.

"This type of learning is the primary purpose of these exercises," said Randy Hull, Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for the City of Winnipeg. "Today's exercise proved that, although our emergency response systems have worked well during real emergencies in the past, we still have learning to do."

Hull emphasized that, “The reality of today's exercise was in our preparations, there was a miscommunication regarding some parameters of the exercise in terms of the involvement of the media. This resulted in an unfortunate situation with media being unable to acquire access to the mock disaster site in a timely way."

The City will now debrief all aspects of this emergency preparedness exercise in order to continually improve response capabilities and systems.

The City would like to express sincere thanks to all of the partner organizations who participated in today’s exercise, in particular, the St. James-Assiniboia School Division, and the staff and students of Westwood Collegiate.