What’s New at RiverWoods

RiverWoods Teams Up With Union County Emergency Services to Ready Themselves for a Disaster

March 20 , 2007

You never know when disaster will strike or where it will strike, but RiverWoods Senior Living Community staff continues to work on ways to improve the response to an emergency.  On Thursday, March 15, RiverWoods partnered with Union County Emergency Services to hold a mock disaster on the RiverWoods campus.  At approximately 10:10 a.m. a call came from the Emergency Operations Center that severe lightening had caught a cluster of cottages on fire.  The RiverWoods Disaster plan was immediately activated and a command post was set up.  A series of severe weather alerts continued to be called in.  During each phase of the process, a call was made to the command center, who in turn, kept residents and staff notified.  While RiverWoods took the necessary precautions to keep residents safe and account for all residents and staff, Union County Emergency Services and other county staff personnel and volunteers were also training to deal with such a disaster by asking themselves questions in regards to emergency situations at RiverWoods.

After the drill had ended, staff and residents were informed that the drill was over and residents and staff returned to their rooms.  A follow-up meeting was held at Emergency Services headquarters to discuss how to improve ways of dealing with the disaster that affects not only RiverWoods, but the entire county. 

Dave Mitchley, Director of Environmental Services at RiverWoods, stated, “This exercise has been very helpful to us at RiverWoods and identified areas of concern and where we need to improve in the event of an emergency.  I am pleased that Emergency Services was willing to participate with us, and I’d like to see this kind of drill occur in the future.”

RiverWoods appreciated the coordination efforts of Michelle Troup and Bob Crebs. The training could not have occurred without their efforts.

Michelle Troup, Deputy Director of Emergency Services, stated, “Riverwoods provided our Emergency Operations Center (EOC) with a learning experience by testing their plan with us; our Emergency Operations Center (EOC) practiced under the National Incident Management System (NIMS) process, which is a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishing a nationwide approach on how we respond to incidents. Our EOC staff had the chance to apply the process during this exercise. Many times a plan is written and thought to be completed.  However, a plan needs to be exercised in order to find the weaknesses and build on the strengths.  This was an opportunity for both sides to exercise their plans and work together for a common goal of protecting our communities.”