Transcript
Any organization that's involved in emergency response should really practice in case these scenarios actually ever play out in real life.
An essential part of emergency management is the preparedness component.
The way that the majority of these training centers that involve derailments are, is a derailment happened in real life, lessons were learned at the derailment by those responding, and the best way to pass those lessons on are to have students train on the situations that occurred during that response. Take all the rail cars that were involved, move them to a training center and set them up exactly as they were such that future generations can learn from what happened in the past.
The exercise of Maple Ridge, the exercise Dynamic Response, was to test the interoperability of Canada's federal partners that would respond to a CBRNE event.
CBRNE: Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives event.
Transport Canada, in dealing with the CBRNE, we are tasked with the C portion. C standing for chemical.
We review emergency response assistance plans and they're going to detail what will be done in case a dangerous goods incident ever occurs.
Anyone that's doing a shipment that has these dangerous goods would need to register with Transport Canada which makes sure that if there's an incident that happens, everyone knows what to do. There is a plan in place. There are people that are ready to respond.
C'est un programme qui est pancanadien, c'est unique au monde.
À tous les jours, il y a du transport de marchandises dangereuses, donc l'exercice s’inclus dans une approche qu'on a pris à Transports Canada avec mon équipe d'engager la GRC, comment on peut travailler avec eux?
Parce qu'on regarde surtout la composante C du CBRN et regardons comment on va travailler ensemble, comment on va pouvoir interagir, se coordonner et utiliser l'ensemble des expertises que Transports et les ressources de l'industrie peuvent apporter pour pouvoir venir supporter rapidement les communautés.
Donc un déraillement dans une petite communauté autant que ce qui peut se passer dans une grande ville et s'assurer que ça se fait de façon sécuritaire, visant à stabiliser et à éliminer tout risque à la sécurité publique.
For the derailment scenario, we had a diesel railcar that had released some of its contents and the diesel was on fire.
We had a sulfur dioxide railcar that had turned on its side and was releasing. And then we also had a styrene car that was leaking from the bottom outlet valve.
The exercise started off just as a regular train derailment and then it slowly transitioned into a security event.
There was an explosion. It was discovered that the derailment was actually intentional, and that's when the RCMP was called in to come and manage the incident.
I believe it did make a difference.
The interoperability factor is one that is significant.
We had over 100 participants from 15 different organizations.
Training together and knowing who would be fulfilling what role and what resources are available makes it so much easier than take that training and learning and transitioning into a real world scenario.