THE Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) will today put on an earthquake simulation, which it will use to test its national response mechanisms and associated policies, plans and procedures in response to a major earthquake.

“The scope of the exercise will be national, incorporating 15 emergency operations centres, one national emergency operations centre, and 14 parish emergency operations centres, with a combination of earthquake drills and simulated activities at incident sites,” the ODPEM said in a press release yesterday.

“The drills will be used to evaluate emergency operations centre procedures; observe the coordination of response agencies; observe the establishment of command at incident sites, the management of these sites and assess the prescribed actions of the response entities and the field for response to mass casualty incident, search and rescue, traffic management and evacuation,” added the ODPEM.

Participating in the drills will be:

. the Central Sorting Office, South Camp Road, Kingston;

. Bank of Jamaica and other businesses along the waterfront in downtown Kingston;

. Ministry of Finance and Planning;

. Port Antonio High School;

. JPS Portland office;

. Brown’s Town Community College, St Ann;

. Manning’s High School, Westmoreland;

. Northern Caribbean University, Mandeville; and

. the Ebony Park Heart Academy in Clarendon.