Wednesday in Southern Vermont the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency and Vermont officials conducted a drill required to be done every other year to determine readiness for a possible nuclear emergency at Entergy’s aging Vermont Yankee power plant .The task of the radio active plume team in an actual emergency would be to sample air and take radio active samples to determine when ,where and if people would be evacuated.
Below are some key parts from the Times Argusnewspaper article that may provide the feel of this learning exercise.These eight points highlight the communication and logistical problems the emergency team was up against. I am not certain how the official quoted here came to the conclusion that “It was great from our end “.
But remember this was only a test, had it been a real emergency there is no reason to believe it would have gone more smoothly.
• ..they couldn't pull down a strong cell phone signal to relay information back to headquarters ……
• …had to resort to contacting people on their private cell phones at the
• …they resorted to using the phone of an official observer of the drill…
• …They were directed to a road off Route 142, which none of them could find on a map…………
• …discovered faulty digital interface from One Communication of Hartford, Conn………
• … a radio that had been tested repeatedly at their staging area in Dummerston, failed to work………
• ….At Route 5, again there was no radio and no cell phone service.
• …were told them to drive around until they found better reception.
Barbara Farr, Vermont's director of emergency management, said after the daylong exercise that alternative routes of communication were established, using radios and the town's fax machine.Here is headline from the same paper from the day before
"The good thing is we always have built-in redundancy," she said. "It went great from our end," she said, a view echoed by Entergy
Yankee component leaks again
also posted here Green Mountain Daily
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