Multi-agency Terror Drill Exercise Held in San Francisco
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Terror Drill Exercise
On Saturday, the San Francisco Fire Department, along with a group of other public and private agencies, ran a large-scale training exercise revolving around an urban weapons of mass destruction terrorist attack.
Daniel Terdiman covered the event for c/net news and delivers an incredible, detailed report.
SAN FRANCISCO–”Weapons of mass destruction multi-agency exercise.”
If I’ve ever covered an event with a more stark title, I can’t think of it.
But there I was Saturday morning, along with several hundred firefighters, police officers, Army National Guard personnel, and members of other local, state, and federal agencies for a large-scale exercise designed to help train all these emergency responders how to deal with a major terrorist attack involving suspected chemical weapons or other bio-hazards.
As a bulletin announcing the exercise put it, the goal was for the agencies’ personnel to “identify the emergency and work as one large team to protect and save lives and mitigate the hazards.”
Practically speaking, this was quite the undertaking. Upon arriving in the middle of San Francisco’s usually crowded financial district, I encountered no traffic, but a wide variety of emergency vehicles and dozens upon dozens of people in almost every official uniform you can imagine.
This is not the first time San Francisco has run an exercise like this. Last year, the city ran another such scenario at the famous pyramid-shaped Transamerica building. This time, the owners of 555 California St., one of the city’s largest office buildings, had asked the city to prepare an exercise in their building. And so for the last year, the city and the owner of that building and another nearby had been planning this day.
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