An emergency preparedness exercise that closed the boat launch and main parking lot at Port Moody’s Rocky Point Park Tuesday morning will give the city a better idea how it can help in a disaster.
Kirk Heaven, deputy chief of PoMo Fire Rescue, said even though the exercise was designed to test the response of several agencies to a 7.3-magnitude earthquake in the Strait of Georgia that has cut off bridge access between Vancouver and the North Shore, Rocky Point Park was enlisted as a staging area for the transport of equipment and personnel because of its capacity to accommodate landings of helicopters, boats and Canadian Coast Guard hovercraft.
All of them stopped at the park at some point during the exercise, which also included the ferrying of equipment dangling from a long line attached to the bottom of a helicopter to Cates Park in North Vancouver, where supplies such as water, tarps and food could be distributed to people affected by the disaster.
Janice Mooney of North Shore Emergency Management said the exercise took about eight months to plan and involved representatives from search and rescue teams in Coquitlam and the North Shore, the Canadian Coast Guard, Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue, Canada Task Force One, Vancouver police marine unit, as well as civic personnel from North Vancouver and Port Moody.
Garry Mancell of Coquitlam Search and Rescue said the exercise offered his group a good opportunity to stay sharp with its own procedures.
“We’re always learning stuff,” he said, adding practice makes perfect, so mistakes like agencies not using a common radio frequency to communicate don’t happen in a real emergency.
