Volunteers to Face Drill, or Real Thing

The American Red Cross isn’t leaving anything to chance this winter in areas expected to be most affected by predicted El Nino storms.

Local Topanga Canyon resident volunteers will be put through a drill Saturday at a Red Cross-sponsored simulation of a disaster in preparation for the real thing.

Working with the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness, the Red Cross will set up a base in the Topanga Community Center on Topanga Canyon Boulevard to give displaced residents food and shelter if they are flooded out of their homes.

“We want to give our volunteers the opportunity to get some additional training and experience in responding to an emergency,” said Joe Bidwell, disaster specialist for the Red Cross West Service Center. “We want to give them that opportunity before the real thing hits, because if they make mistakes . . . we want them to get those mistakes made in a setting that’s not going to affect real disaster victims.”

Another Red Cross response drill will be held in Malibu, also an area very likely to have problems from the torrential rains expected with the weather phenomenon.

The Red Cross targeted areas that are prone to flooding and mudslides that were hardest hit in the last El Nino storms in the early 1980s.

The agency is training local residents to respond in emergencies because they may be closed off from outside help in a disaster.

In the case of Topanga Canyon, there is only one road in and out of the canyon. If Topanga Canyon Boulevard is blocked to traffic, residents will be vulnerable, he said.

Red Cross officials said a temblor occurred on the day the agency had an earthquake-response drill in April, so volunteers are fully expecting heavy rains to hit Saturday.

“If it rains, it’ll just make it all the more realistic,” Bidwell said. “If something actually happens that we’ll need to open up a shelter, we’ll already have our people out there.”