JUST over two weeks after a magnitude-7 earthquake demolished the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and leaving millions homeless, an earthquake drill in Spanish Town yesterday was treated as a joke by participants in the simulation, while emergency services were late in their response.

Half-an-hour after the 10:00 am drill began at the St Catherine Parish Council offices in the old capital, the ambulance had not arrived to transport those labelled as seriously injured or dying.

But while it was admittedly a time of trial and error, a number of the council workers who converged outside after simulated ‘smoke’ forced them out of the upper floor of the brick building, spent the time making light of the situation.

Having found the lighter side to the situation, a number of people laughed uncontrollably instead of accounting for the workers in their respective departments. There was no one converging at either of the many signs marked “General Assembly Point”, “Treatment May Be Delayed”, “Critical – Treat Immediately”, and “Dead or Dying”.

“Ah earthquake dis or fire?” one worker asked, erupting in uncontrollable laughter as she pointed to the ‘smoke’ billowing from the upper floor.

“Can we go and look for Sean or Craig?” asked another.

“Sean dead or missing,” laughed her colleague.

Twenty minutes after the drill began, the fire truck stationed almost a stone’s throw from the site was not yet on the scene.

“Maybe they have trouble getting here because of the rubble in the road,” one woman commented with a snicker.

Assistant Superintendent James Lee of the Spanish Town fire station told the Observer that the unit was late getting to the scene because they had an emergency to attend to at that time.

He said, however, that had there been an earthquake, arrangements would have been made to deploy a unit from another fire station to that emergency, thus allowing the unit from the Spanish Town station to respond.

With no two-way-radio communication, Lee said he used a cellphone to place a call to the station, the only means firefighters have of communicating with each other while outside the station.

Asked if two-way radios were not the better option, given that the communication system could be destroyed in a major earthquake, Lee agreed that there needed to be some improvement in that area.

Lee, meanwhile, admitted that there were areas of the drill that needed to be improved although he noted that workers evacuated the building in the allotted time.

He said the fire department was expected to pull from the experiences of some of its own who were sent to Haiti to work in the search and rescue mission in that country to help find survivors of the January 12 quake.

“There are some things that we have been learning from what happened in Haiti, and so some of the persons who went there will help us so we can do all that we need to do in case of a real emergency,” he said.

He said also that it was critical that more people should be trained in different areas in responding to emergencies.

Sophia Mitchell, regional co-ordinator at the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, agreed that the response to the drill could have been much better.

“The drill had quite a number of shortcomings, but we still have to congratulate the council for taking the initiative,” she said.

“Overall we find that people still don’t take drills seriously,” she said. But Mitchell said it was important that earthquake drills be taken seriously, especially in Spanish Town, given the large number of structures made from brick and wood.

“If we were to have an earthquake of a magnitude-8 and above, these buildings would seriously be impacted,” she said.

Meanwhile, Carmen Bartley, acting disaster co-ordinator for the parish council, said while it “wasn’t a bad exercise”, the participants could have taken the matter more seriously. She said, however, that they were able to get people out of the building within the 20-minute response time.

“The seriousness of how people take these drills can be greatly improved,” she said.