(Aug. 2, 2012) -- Staff from the National Weather Service Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley forecast office participated in an emergency management exercise at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Headquarters, Rio Grande Valley Sector, on July 27.

The exercise was designed to gather local, state, and federal partners and test the capabilities of the webEOC® event management system using the approach of a strengthening hurricane as the test episode.

Warning Coordination Meteorologist Barry Goldsmith worked with leaders of the sector team's Office of Incident Management to develop the fictitious Hurricane "Red Drum", as well as embedded hazardous materials incidents where local weather decision support would be layered into the larger scale hurricane event.

Each instance of weather decision support was considered a separate event, used by the incident command system to update plans and make decisions for actions which focused on evacuation by land, air and sea.

Six event briefings were prepared to cover each 12 hour forecast from 60 hours prior to landfall -- until landfall. The entire 60 hour event was compressed into a three hour exercise window.

Forecaster Justin Gibbs and Warning Coordination Meteorologist Barry Goldsmith provided a number of on-site briefings to decision makers throughout the exercise. Meanwhile, two separate hazardous materials events were put in play.

One involved an electrical fire in the cab of a jackknifed propane tanker. Another event featured a train derailment which had a tanker car leaking chlorine.

For these events, "mock" phone calls were made to the forecast office in Brownsville, where Senior Forecaster Tim Speece and Forecaster Blair Scholl used Areal Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres (ALOHA) to model the extent and movement of each chemical plume.

Goldsmith noted, "By including staff members on-site and in the forecast office, we were able to practice a situation that could really happen - where multiple instances of weather decision support services are required simultaneously."

Exercises like Hurricane "Red Drum" improve staff readiness for such decision support possibilities by involving them directly with the growing number of emergency management partners and helps everyone associated in building a WeatherReady Rio Grande Valley.

webEOC is a registered trademark of ESi Acquisition, Inc.

---