Emergency Response Plan May Be Updated

Say you’re a paramedic racing to an overturned tanker on the Ventura Freeway. You arrive and see a cloud of thick, deadly chlorine gas pouring from the wrecked truck, drifting toward nearby homes.

The homes will have to be evacuated, but who will do it and how?

Thousand Oaks, like all cities, is required by the federal government to prepare an emergency operations plan to answer such questions, but has not updated its plan in more than a year.

That may soon change. Planning Commission Chairman Forrest Frields has offered the services of the volunteer Disaster Assistance Response Team, of which he is a member, to help city officials revise the plan.

The city’s current emergency plan gives broad directions on how to handle different crises. But it needs greater detail, Frields said, as well as a comprehensive and accurate list of phone numbers that emergency workers might need.

“Everything in it is laid out very logically and clearly, but it needs to be updated,” he said.

The disaster response team could help by compiling and checking phone numbers, a simple but lengthy task. Frields said the work could take about three months.

Stacy Park, the senior management analyst in the city manager’s office who will probably coordinate the update, said that by its nature, the emergency plan may always be slightly out of date.

“The problem is, the minute that we print the new document, somebody’s phone number is going to change,” she said.