The county’s emergency services manager criticized the
secretive, real-life drill put on Thursday by the integrated waste
management department
– and he noted how another emergency situation occurred during
the practice session involving a boy injured at Hollister’s skate
park
The county’s emergency services manager criticized the secretive, real-life drill put on Thursday by the integrated waste management department – and he noted how another emergency situation occurred during the practice session involving a boy injured at Hollister’s skate park.
Jim Clark, the emergency services manager for San Benito County, said he had not been aware of the county Integrated Waste Management Regional Agency’s plan to hold a hazardous materials drill Thursday afternoon on San Juan Road.
“I had no idea this was going down,” said Clark, who has been involved with drills for other local agencies in the past. “There is not necessarily a protocol, per se. But what we will do on occasion when different agencies will perform drills or exercises – typically they are announced.”
Clark said he was still finding out details about the drill, but he noted concerns with emergency response units such as the Hollister Fire Department and Calfire not knowing that they were responding to a drill. Clark said that if another serious emergency came up in the county, they would be unable to prioritize.
Clark mentioned that another emergency call did come in during the drill – a report of a male at Hollister’s skate park injured in a bicycle accident. Initial reports indicated that a handle bar went through the boy’s leg, while other details are unclear at this point.
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“You don’t send out an emergency response like that and close down highways,” he said. “There was another critical medical emergency going on at that same time and when you have as few resources as we do, it would have been nice to know (it was a drill.) Luckily, nothing went sideways.”
The child in the accident at the skate park on Memorial Drive was airlifted to a hospital. He added that if a more serious accident happened at the same time as the drill, dispatchers might have called in resources from Monterey County, not knowing that the hazmat response was an exercise.
He acknowledged that live field exercises can be hard to pull off.
“You want to make it as realistic as possible, but in my experience you don’t do what I think happened,” he said. “The drill should be something that goes on in the background instead of the forefront – when dealing with anything coming up for real.”
Clark did stress that drills and exercises can be important, especially for skills that are not often used in real-life situations, such as hazardous material responses.
“It sounds like a lot of folks weren’t aware it was a drill,” he said.
