Putnam Emergency Preparedness Drill Successful Tuesday

Putnam County held a full-scale training exercise Tuesday bringing together the Putnam County School System and all emergency service agencies.

EMS Chief Tommy Copeland said the exercise went well, but there are still several things that can be tweaked to improve preparedness. Copeland said the exercise is to train emergency services on how to respond.

“We have a great working relationship,” Copeland said. “The hospital, tech, school system, all the emergency responders, EMS, fire or law enforcement, state-level, federal-level, whatever. We all work very well and very closely together here.”

Copeland said events like these show where responders may need improvement. He said that full-scale exercises such as these are conducted once a year, as well as smaller exercises, called table-top exercises.

“It’s to make sure that we test our capabilities, test our processes, our responses, our equipment, and make sure if there’s a problem we can fix that in a drill environment, and that low-stress environment,” Copeland said. “Rather than waiting for an actual event.”

Copeland said that with each exercise a new situation is picked that could endanger the community and made the subject of each drill. Copeland said that one of the most important things that exercises like these test for is ease of communication between different departments.

“Like the event that we’ve done this morning, this is very common in schools, that particular schools it’s very difficult to talk in and out on certain radio frequencies,” Copeland said. “With us finding that out, with us knowing that on the front end, then we know when we go there if we go there for an event, then we gotta us alternate communication to make that work.”