EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE
Exercise launches new Vacaville Emergency Response Center
For much of Thursday, Pacific Gas & Electric employees were responding to reports of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake striking the Hayward fault.
Only this was not a real report but rather a training exercise to ensure the company is ready to respond to a catastrophic quake. The drill preceded the launch of PG&E’s new Vacaville Emergency Response Center on Allison Parkway. Denny Boyles, a corporate relations representative for PG&E who also served as an evaluator for the exercise, said the center had been used once previously for a grid control exercise last year but became fully operational after the conclusion of Thursday’s drill.
“They want to do a drill in it first to make sure that all the technology’s working,” he said.
Boyles led a group of local media reporters through one hour of the training exercise, which began at 7 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. He said the scenario was developed by the United States Geological Survey, and the participants followed what was outlined.
“We’re not gonna be experts on earthquakes, but we look at what they say would happen and we create damage maps,” he said.
As they would normally be during a major quake, the center was buzzing with activity. Participants included many different members of different PG&E departments throughout the region as well as members of national and statewide organizations, such as the
"We’re not gonna be experts on earthquakes, but we look at what they say would happen and we create damage maps."
— Denny Boyles, a corporate relations representative for PG&E
Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IX, U.S. Department of Energy, California Office of Emergency Services and observers from the California Public Utilities Commission and Bay Area Rapid Transit.
“An earthquake would affect BART,” Boyles said. “They’re coming to watch to get an idea from us what it would be like.”
Over in the SIMCELL room, participants sat along several rows of desks where every 15 to 20 minutes, participants would receive “calls” from media organizations like CNN and be presented with challenges to solve.
Over in the Alternate Emergency Operation Center — intended to serve as a backup center if the main EOCs are inaccessible due to disaster, participants sat at monitors with digital maps to oversee activity.
One large screen displayed a map of the state that served as an outage management tool for electricity levels. Green dots indicated 1,000 customers without power in a region, red indicated major impacts and blue indicated no impacts.
“It’s kind of simulating what we would experience in an earthquake in the Bay Area,” Boyles said.
Another screen displayed the status of the gas system. Participants also would receive simulated calls relaying scenarios such as a hospital seeking assistance for a generator that is operational but low on fuel or customers asking when power will be restored because their generators only have four hours left.
“Safety might get a report from a crew in the field that a highway that we believed was functional isn’t,” Boyles said. “They need to route crews around it because there’s damage to a highway or a bridge is closed.”
Boyles said the intelligence department receives a lot of reports out in the field.
“Every field worker we have out there is gathering data basically,” he said.
Boyles said the company has on-call teams who are ready to respond to disasters, and participants are often chosen directly out of those teams.
“I had some of them that I kept in the drill, but I had a few people that the roles they would do, I’ve seen them do that role multiple times and I had someone else who needed to be trained in that role,” he said. “You want somebody on the team who’s got enough experience to manage the team, but you also want to expose other people and it’s a safe environment for that. We can make a mistake here today and be coached through it.”
The exercise also provided an opportunity for employees to take on different roles. For example, Jason Regan usually serves as the director of control center operations, but for the drill, he was the EOC commander. He said the day began with a simulated “first operational period” were those that could make it — given the challenges of the road in such a scenario — were trying to work with the data they had.
“This morning, we did a lot of recovery on what really is going on now that we’ve got the sunlight up,” he said. “You have a utility provider that’s trying to ensure our assets are safe and we’re trying to get some situational understanding about either the communities we serve, the impacts to them and our own employees and corporate ability to maintain through the event.”
Boyles said PG&E does at least two companywide exercises a year and smaller drills such as a public safety power shutoff simulating what would happen if power were shut off in a mountain community. Other exercises prepare PG&E employees for disasters such as storms, floods and wildfires.
“We spent 40 days activated for actual emergencies last year, but many of the people who work those are here today training because something might have changed since then,” he said. “You also train new people.”
Additionally, Boyles said that PG&E trains for different emergencies because the needs are always different.
“We drill for everything imaginable,” he said.