An emergency exercise involving officials from four Essex County municipalities, both provincial and federal governments, Windsor Regional Hospital and others continues Wednesday.
That means another day residents living in Amherstburg, LaSalle, Tecumseh and Essex may see more emergency vehicles on the roads than usual. In Amherstburg, residents may even hear sirens while officials practice what they would do should there be an incident at the Detroit Edison Fermi II nuclear power plant across the river in Monroe, Michigan.
Amherstburg Mayor Aldo DiCarlo calls the exercise insurance.
"Part of Amherstburg at least is in the primary fall out zone. You hope you never have to activate a plan like this, but if you ever do, that'll be the time when you look back and go 'boy, I'm glad we did that,'" he says. "Should something that catastrophic happen, we would be prepared for it."
DiCarlo says Spring Day VIII is a full dress rehearsal. That includes how to communicate with different agencies to make sure everyone works together efficiently, blocking select roads, planning an evacuation, and dealing with the potential impacts on human health. But DiCarlo doesn't want to alarm anyone.
"I did recently go did do a tour of Fermi. They do have a lot of safety measures in place. But if something like that ever happened, I think, we'd be prepared."
In the mock scenerio, there is a reportable event at the Fermi II reactor resulting in an unexpected shutdown of the reactor and a controlled release of radioactive vapour into the environment. Officials are assessing the short and long-term effect on transportation throughout the region and over the border.
While this exercise focuses on a nuclear disaster, training exercises also help enhance abilities to respond to other catastrophes both natural and man-made.
