Sunday wildfire drill successful, reveals areas for improvement

There was no smoke, and no fire.

But Douglas County emergency personnel responded anyway, hoping to be better prepared for the next time a plume of wildfire smoke rises from the Lake Tahoe Basin.

The Sunday afternoon evacuation drill in Stateline had its missteps, but identifying them before a real blaze gets started was exactly the point, said Bob Cook, project coordinator of the Chimney Rock Chapter of the Nevada Fire Safe Council, which organized the drill.

"Well, everything went good you know," Cook said Monday. "We did identify a couple of things that can be corrected. The biggest thing probably was the fact that search and rescue needs more equipment, better radios. They were having a hard time communicating."

A reverse 911 system was also less effective than officials had hoped because of people's move toward cell phones and away from land-line telephones, Cook said.

The Fire Safe Council will work with the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District to get more people to list their cell phones with the system, Cook said.

Sunday's drill, which kicked off Wildfire Awareness Week, simulated a wildfire threatening both the Round Hill and Middle Kingsbury neighborhoods.

Emergency responders set up an incident command center at the outdoor basketball courts at Kahle Community Center and more than a dozen local agencies, joined by numerous volunteers from local businesses and the Chimney Rock and Round Hill Nevada Fire Safe Council chapters, participated in the drill.

The evacuation targeted about 800 people. Twenty-eight checked into the Red Cross stationed at the Tahoe Transportation Center building, across from Lakeside Inn & Casino, after going through the motions of an evacuation. While the number seems small, it was more than the Red Cross expected, Cook said.

The number of agencies participating in the drill increased significantly from the first time the Chimney Rock Fire Safe Chapter organized a similar drill in summer 2008. The chapter began organizing the drills following June 2007's Angora fire.

Ideally people would be pre-packed with essentials so they could evacuate in a hurry, but most are not, Cook said, admitting he was among them.

"We conduct the events primarily to give the public the option to go through the physical drill of evacuating, so that they can see what's involved," Cook said.

But getting agencies that don't work together on a day-to-day basis familiar with how they would be required to function in an emergency is an added benefit, Cook said.

"It's not so much for all of the agencies, but it's really a great opportunity for the agencies to get together to find out how they can improve," Cook said.

The Chimney Rock Chapter of the Nevada Fire Safe Council expects to conduct a similar evacuation drill every two years.

"This is only the second time we've done this," Cook said. "Doing it before, we didn't have half of the participation we did this time. It was fantastic to see all of the agencies working together," Cook said.

"All of us have a better idea of what to expect," Cook added.