Emergency program coordinators from all over the Island, the Sunshine Coast and even Washington are taking part in a training exercise Wednesday, May 3rd.
Exercise Sweeper is taking place in Parksville and follows up on the large scale emergency planning exercise that was held in Port Alberni last year.
Emergency Program coordinator Aaron Dawson says many municipalities realized they had a major weakness.
“We realize that communications needed a lot of work…so before we have a real major event…we wanted to test how we send messages to our provincial government representatives that are going to get us the things we need,” he says.
Dawson notes that most people won’t notice anything, except maybe low-flying Canadian Air Force aircraft in the sky which will be helping to receive and transmit messages in the same manner that might be done during an earthquake.
