Emergency Preparedness—

Officials Practice With Communications Gear For Potential Pandemic

By Andrew Gorosko

Town officials have conducted an emergency training exercise to practice using electronic communications equipment to interact with other municipal officials in the Housatonic Valley Region in the event of an influenza pandemic.

Town Health Director Donna Culbert said this week that six Newtown officials gathered for the session on April 7 at the town’s emergency operations center in the Sandy Hook Firehouse on Riverside Road. Ms Culbert, who coordinated the training session, is also the town’s deputy emergency management director.

At the two-hour exercise, town officials used communications gear to interact with municipal officials in other places in six other towns within the ten-town Housatonic Valley Region.

Communications equipment in use during the drill included videoconferencing gear, conventional telephone lines, cellular telephones, email, and fax machines, according to Ms Culbert.

The training session covered the public strategies on how to deal with a flu pandemic within individual communities, as well as within the broader region. Participants also studied collaboration with state agencies.

The training program was intended to describe individual government agencies’ specific responsibilities in the event of a flu pandemic, and also to explain how the various agencies would interact with each other in dealing with the situation.

Bill Halstead, town emergency management director, said the training exercise showed that the town’s communications equipment is in good working order.

Ms Culbert said that another pandemic influenza outbreak is likely to occur in the future. It is unclear, however, when such a pandemic would occur and how severe such an incident might be, she said.

Although the United States has technical strength in health care, the ubiquity of international travel via airliners creates conditions through which viral influenza could rapidly spread around the world, creating a pandemic, according to Ms Culbert.

Since 1918, there have been three serious pandemic flu situations in the world, she said.

The worst of those incidents was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, in which tens of millions of people died worldwide, including an estimated 500,000 people in the Unites States, she said.

In 1957, the Asian flu pandemic hit the planet, killing about two million people worldwide, of which about 70,000 lived in the United States she said.

In 1968, the Hong Kong flu pandemic struck, killing approximately one million people across the world, including about 34,000 people in the United States, Ms Culbert said.

Pandemic situations may occur when previously unknown strains of the influenza virus surface for which there are no vaccines. A pandemic is a widespread epidemic.

It could take several months to develop a vaccine to fight a previously unknown strain of influenza, she said.

If a influenza pandemic strikes, society may need to alter its public activities until the infectious situation comes under control, she said. For example, schools might need to temporarily close and large public gatherings might need to be postponed to deal with a pandemic.

In April 2008, Newtown officials participated in a regional field training exercise in a Bethel industrial park that simulated the emergency steps that would be taken in the event of a pandemic influenza outbreak.

Billed as a “pandemic flu surge capacity triage center exercise” that four-day program culminated in a drill in which 134 volunteers posing as flu patients were checked to determine the severity of their “symptoms.”

At the April 2008 event, Ms Culbert worked in the area of satellite telephone communications. Such devices would provide voice links between emergency organizations in the event that other means of communications are not working in an emergency.