LV won’t be part of terrorism training exercise

Friday, Aug. 15, 2003 | 11:06 a.m.

The city of Las Vegas will not participate in a local large-scale terrorism training exercise next week because it was scheduled too close to a similar week-long exercise that concludes today at a federal facility in Maryland.

Fifty city employees participated in the Federal Emergency Management Administration's disaster training course in Emmitsburg, Md., that featured classroom seminars and a simulated disaster exercise on Thursday.

Clark County's Emergency Manager Jim O'Brien said he believes the city's decision not to participate in Determined Promise '03, which begins Monday and will last 11 days, is not a snub of the Department of Defense exercise, but rather just a scheduling issue.

"The city was invited and had offered to participate on a limited basis," but that did not fit in with the scope of the exercise, O'Brien said. "It's difficult to tie up one week of a person's schedule, but two weeks or more is just too big a chunk of time to play catchup."

O'Brien said Clark County participated in the same FEMA exercise in Maryland in 1996, and noted it is an important session "to shake out the cobwebs to focus on emergency management skills that may have to one day be put into practice at home."

The city is not the only local municipality to pass on Determined Promise. Henderson, Boulder City and Mesquite also will not participate and North Las Vegas will participate on a limited basis, O'Brien said.

Nevertheless, Determined Promise will involve 1,200 local participants and 2,000 people from across the nation, putting the national spotlight on Clark County and its emergency preparedness procedures.

Despite local agencies not coordinating efforts on next week's exercise, O'Brien said "I am fully confident" that during a real disaster, the county and municipalities will gel.

"We are coordinated at the alert levels and continue to keep updated on conference calls," he said. "The system is in place."

City and county officials say there is a waiting list for the Maryland FEMA training sessions and it is difficult to reschedule. The city of Las Vegas had been on that list for two years, City Manager Doug Selby said.

"The two actions were coincidentally back-to-back," Selby said. "But we still would like to see if there is some role we might be able to play in Determined Promise."

From previous correspondence between the city and county, that seems unlikely.

O'Brien received a letter dated Oct. 21 from Las Vegas Emergency Manager Tim McAndrew, explaining that the scheduling conflict would make it difficult for the city to participate in Determined Promise, then seven months away.

McAndrew wrote that the city has "a tentative interest in participation in Determined Promise" but that the city would be returning from the FEMA exercise on Aug. 15. He asked if Determined Promise "could be rescheduled further into 2003."

The city's "participation prior to Aug. 25, 2003, is not likely," he wrote.

The city's offer for limited participation late in the exercise was not accepted because the local agencies' part of the exercise is primarily for the first week, while the remaining days of the exercise focus on the participating federal agencies, including FEMA, O'Brien said.

For the Maryland exercise, the federal government paid for the transportation, boarding and training of the city employees and 25 workers from other municipalities and agencies, including nine Metro Police personnel. Clark County Emergency Management Assistant Manager Carolyn Levering was the sole county employee to participate in that exercise, O'Brien said.

Las Vegas Deputy City Manager Steven Houchens said the city petitioned FEMA for the training session that he said was "designed to learn what the experts know and how to apply it to our emergency plans."

Representatives from all of the city's 15 departments participated in the exercise that Houchens said focused primarily on disasters such as earthquakes and flash floods.

"Departments such as Finance participated because it will be up to that department to procure goods during a disaster, while Leisure Activities sent a representative because in an emergency that department's responsibility is to identify shelter," Houchens said.

When the city employees return next week, they will talk to other employees in their departments about what they learned, Houchens said.

Houchens said that the absence of 50 city employees this week resulted in no interruption of services. Selby said with a city staff of 2,800, it's not uncommon for at least 50 employees to be on vacation during any one week.

"It was business as usual," Houchens said. "We had plenty of time to prepare so we had the support staff in place."

Among those from the city to go to the FEMA exercise were Mayor Oscar Goodman and Selby.

"We think we did well," Selby said after Thursday's exercise. "It validated our past planning and procedures."

Potential changes in current plans resulting from the training include developing a better procedure for mobilizing large numbers of volunteers who come forward during a disaster, Selby said.

Next week's Determined Promise exercise will simulate a public health emergency in Southern Nevada.

The event will include simulations for threats of terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Much of the exercise will be conducted on computers and radios from the U.S. Northern Command's headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The goal of the exercise is to test the preparedness of the newly established Northern Command, a division of the Department of Defense that provides homeland defense support to state and local agencies.