County’s Quake Drill Gets Upstaged
Why bother with a training exercise when you can go through the real thing?
So, because of the real earthquake last week, a quake drill scheduled for next week has been canceled, the Orange County Fire Department said Thursday.
“There would be no way the people at the state level doing damage assessment” caused by the Oct. 1 temblor that rocked Los Angeles and Orange counties “could do it for the drill,” said Dale Brown, an official in the Fire Department’s emergency management division.
Brown said he and other county fire officials would not have been able to take part in the drill.
“We have to be involved” at the earthquake disaster office in La Habra, Brown said, “when it opens Sunday. We wouldn’t have been able to do the drill even if we wanted to.”
The drill had been planned months ago as a test of how communications would hold up and damages would be assessed in the event of a “catastrophic” earthquake far greater than the 6.1-magnitude temblor on Oct. 1.
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