WESTERN SKIES - August 2, 2005

*** PUBLIC HEALTH DRILL ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Health Officials in the U.S. are keeping a close eye on an avian flu strain that has hit Russia. On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said the outbreak could be "the pandemic we're worried about." Last week, the Weld County Health Department conducted a mock-exercise to prepare for an avian flu outbreak. KUNC's Brian Larson has more.

BRIAN LARSON: It's a scenario that's not too unlikely. There's a statewide outbreak of Avian Influenza in humans. And infections have been reported on college campuses, including the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State University.

To stop the virus from spreading, the Weld County Health Department requests a novel form of vaccine and other anti-viral medications from the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile. Receiving and transferring the vaccine to distribution sites was the focus of the full-scale simulation.

[sound of radio dispatcher]

LARSON: But instead of medicine, pallets of bottled water, applesauce and peanut butter crackers donated from Wal-Mart were shipped to the receiving bay of the Weld County Food Bank. A forklift was used to unload the pallets.

[sound of forklift]

LARSON: Once out of the truck, workers wearing different colored safety vests identified their positions, first inventoried the shipment, then broke down the pallets and reloaded the supplies on trucks for delivery to two of nine PODS, or Point of Dispensing Sites, around the county.

Trevor Jiriceck is the Director of Environmental Health for the Weld County Health Department and incident commander for the exercise. He says unlike an earlier simulation in January that contained "injects," or elements that weren't planned for, this drill was more "scripted"

TREVOR JIRICECK: We know when things are going to happen, we know how they're supposed to happen, and we know where they are going to happen, who the players are. So it's a little different approach. But to me, as useful or more useful for a group of people who don't train in that very often. Gee, now we know what it's supposed to look, feel, taste like.

DEB BLANDEN: The ideal situation is first you plan, and than you exercise.

LARSON: Deb Blanden is the Department's Emergency Preparedness Planner.

BLANDEN: Well we've kind of done both concurrently because of the short time frame that we've had to do all this stuff in.

LARSON: It took Blanden more than eight months to coordinate the resources and organize the more than sixty people from the Health Department, Police and Fire Departments and other support agencies who took part in the simulation.

BLANDEN: It's kind of a fine line. You don't want to prep people too much because then you lose the aspect of the exercise and the learning experience.

LARSON: The thirty-six thousand dollar exercise was funded by a State Homeland Security grant and money from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The choice of responding to Avian Influenza versus an act of bioterrorism was influenced by similar drills already conducted at the regional level by the State Health department this summer.

And for the most part things went smoothly, except for a late truck and a pallet of water that need to be restacked by hand before it was initially unloaded from the shipment.

Roz White was one of two members of the SNS team from Pueblo's City/County Health Department evaluating the drill. She gave the group good marks for their organization and communication skills, but did find areas for improvement

ROZ WHITE: Checking in items. And it's hard to do it when you are doing a mock training, because you don't really go through quite all the motions that you should. If this were a real evaluation they would have to make sure they inventoried everything directly. Today they just suspected that everything was correct inside.

LARSON: Trevor Jiriceck says the staff at the Weld County Health Department will compile their own after action report and improvement plan by the end of AugustÉ

JIRICECK: To me the bottom-line goal is gaining some level of comfort, that should a disaster like we're training for today happen, that we're prepared and comfortable with moving forward with this large-scale deployment

LARSON: Aside from being better prepared, another county agency also benefited from the exercise. The cases of water and food used in the simulation were donated to the Weld County Food Bank.

For Western Skies, I'm Brian Larson in Greeley.