Increasing Emergency Preparedness through International Exercises

摘要

BC Hydro and many dam owners around the world have emergency procedures for unusual or unexpected performance of its dams. In addition, they have emergency response plans that would be used by downstream response agencies to assist them in their roles of warning and evacuating those persons who would be threatened by a failure of the dam. Tes-ting and exercising of these plans is crucial in maintaining an effective level of preparedness. BC Hydro has a program of updating and testing the plans through "tabletop" exercises conducted every two years and extensive "functional" exercises every 2 or 3 years. The man-agement team from the specific facility and the key response agencies work through specific threats from a dam and ensure that communication and response activities are aligned. Although most rivers are fully contained within the Province of British Columbia, one notable exception is the Columbia River, which is the largest river flowing into the Pacific Ocean in North America. It is just over 2 000 km long, has a drainage area of 670 000 km2. The river originates in south-eastern British Columbia and flows into the United States before entering the Pacific Ocean near Portland Oregon. There are fourteen dams on the main stem of the Columbia River with seven utilities in-volved in their ownership and operation. This covers two countries (Canada and the United States), one Canadian province, 2 American states and over 30 local jurisdictions. It was important to BC Hydro, which owns and operates the three most upstream dams,that all downstream utilities and emergency response agencies would be able to work together effectively in the event of an emergency condition at one of its dams. To verify this, an inter-national emergency preparedness exercise was designed that would involve these utilities and agencies in a multi-day response to simulated emergency flood conditions driven by a major failure condition at one of BC Hydro's dams in Canada. The exercise, which took over a year to plan, was conducted over a 5 day period in early March 2008. The exercise involved 120 people in 6 hydroelectric utilities, two national or-ganizations and 3 provincial/state agencies and 12 of the 30 local jurisdictions. The exercise was viewed by all participants as a success with findings related to interna-tional flow coordination, use of metric and imperial measurements, and conveying technical flow information to local response agencies.