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Mass casualty exercise planned for Durango

Section of U.S. 550 to close for drill

Training day: A massive drill involving 240 people will shut down part U.S. Highway 550 and congest the vicinity of Sunnyside Elementary School and the Durango School District 9-R offices sometime during normal business hours on Tuesday.

School district officials and local authorities are calling it a full-scale, mass-casualty exercise.

“The public needs to know,” said 9-R’s Julie Popp. “We don’t want to induce any unnecessary panic in the community.”

The exercise will test all emergency agencies’ systems of preparedness, response and recovery, according to a 9-R news release.

The drill at Sunnyside, located just off U.S. Highway 550 just north of Bondad Hill, will involve local and regional emergency first responders, law enforcement, emergency management services, the Durango Fire Protection District, area hospitals and victim advocates, all working together, mimicking a scenario of a school in crisis.

“It will help put into practice some of our procedures around an emergency school crisis but would actually play well to other kinds of community crisis as well,” Popp said. “If there was an incident that occurred in a mall or a theater, for instance.”

The school district’s offices, 201 E. 12th St., Durango, will act as a parent-reunification site, Popp said, and it will serve in training staff around that aspect of an emergency.

“It’s our first exercise of this scale,” she said.

The activities are expected to disrupt the flow of traffic around all participating locations, Popp said. A set time has not been released.

“We don’t want to give away specifics of the time it will take place, but it might be best if people stayed away from those areas that day,” Popp said.

bmathis@durangoherald.com

This story has been corrected since its original publication.



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