MIAMI – It’s a person of South Florida’s greatest apply drills for an genuine disaster.
“The hurricane is known as Hurricane Marsha and it hit the DR (Dominican Republic,), it could have hit South Florida,” said Ruben Almagur, director of Florida Intercontinental University’s Academy for International Disaster Preparedness.
FIU has a Master’s Diploma application in Catastrophe Management. Section of that is the 4-working day “catastrophe subject study course” exercise which is staged at the Roz and Calk Covens Conference Middle in North Miami. The disaster is a real-daily life simulation of a class 5 hurricane in the Caribbean.
All through the workout, Master’s candidate pupils are tasked with organizing a response stuffed with area, countrywide, and intercontinental experts as perfectly as methods this kind of as helicopter aerial sights and also professionals offering actual-time assessment of cases in disaster aid response.
“There’s no smoke and mirrors, they are having MREs, applying a porta potty, not sleeping, it truly is raining, this is a authentic-lifestyle catastrophe environment,” stated Almagur.
He said this has turn out to be just one of the largest disaster simulations in the condition to enable in a disaster abroad as properly as close to home.
“If this was an additional Hurricane Andrew in Homestead, you could have 10 of these. You can find never enough potential to household folks, feed men and women, to have fuel, to be able to have initial responders and the community response,” explained Almagur.
He claimed the base camp they set up was extremely equivalent to what was established up in the Fort Myers space right after Hurricane Ian. Likewise, there are numerous companies together with FEMA, the Coastline Guard, Miami Fire Rescue, and nonprofit groups these kinds of as Food for the Lousy and World-wide Empowerment Mission getting component.
“We’re receiving a opportunity to work with all people in a simulated scenario so that we can make interactions so that we can fully grasp what we need to have to do superior,” said Patrick Lynch with International Empowerment Mission.
“So there is a ton of things that we created into the training. Generators are going to fall short. Another person is heading to get hurt, we may well have to medically examine an individual out of in this article. W have people that were meant to present up with food items and provides for the community they will not exhibit up,” mentioned Almagur.
The learners consider portion in organizing this training to complete their program though the experts use it as a different instrument to prepare for the real point.
FIU’s catastrophe simulation is now in its 8th yr and has tripled in measurement as far as the selection of agencies collaborating.
