Operations and Training Officer, Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency

>> My name is David Boucher. I'm the Operations and Training Officer for Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency and I have a dual role. I have the operation side and then the training side. The operation side I maintain the Emergency Operation Center which is co-located with the 911 center in Manheim and then on the training side I make sure that the emergency management coordinators that emergency operation staff and the emergency agency staff are all trained and that's done through training seminars, workshops, table tops and exercises. Hazmat incidents, large scale structure fires that kind of thing we do deal with a lot of weather events so we might have some projected time to prepare for that event but some of the spontaneous calls might be hazardous materials and something like that. Well, day-to-day without an emergency it's typically setting up, in my role it's setting up and conducting training and exercises so a lot of preparation goes into training and exercises. So a ten minute exercise or drill might take a few weeks to get together with all of the different agencies that are involved. We do several different types of drills. There are five main types of drills and depending on the scale and scope of the exercise or training it really can take a few hours to a year. So we have an exercise working group with the different counties in our region and we prepare exercises that we're going to do jointly and within our own counties so there's a lot of preparation in getting those exercises together.