Yesterday 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 nuclear emergency. The task of the radio active plume team in an actual emergency would be to sample air and take radio active samples to determine if when and where people would be evacuated.

Here are some key parts from the TA article that may give the feel of this learning exercise.I am not certain how the official quoted here comes the conclusion that “It was great from our end “.

• ..they couldn’t pull down a strong cell phone signal to relay information back to headquarters …….

• …resort to contacting people on their private cell phones at the center in Brattleboro to find out what was wrong…

• …resorting to 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…………..

• …faulty digital interface from One Communication of Hartford, Conn……….

• …The radio had been tested repeatedly at their staging area in Dummerston, but now it failed to work………

• ….At Route 5, again there was no radio and no cell phone service.

• …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.

“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

http://www.timesargus.com/arti…