Local emergency management personnel will be participating in January in a state-sponsored exercise to test the region’s ability to communicate during a terrorist attack.

The primary objective of the two-day exercise is to assess local and regional plans for radio communications during and after a catastrophic event. These plans will improve local government’s response actions.

Similar exercises are planned for other regions of the state under a program developed by the Texas Division of Emergency Management, (DEM) and facilitated by the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) at Texas A&M University.

The Houston-Galveston regional exercise will help enhance the area’s ability to prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from natural and man-made disasters including deliberate acts of terrorism.

Exercise participants will be required to demonstrate their ability to communicate on various radio frequencies across agency lines. The Galveston County Office of Emergency Management, under the direction of the Galveston County Commissioners Court, has facilitated the procurement and deployment of more than $2 million worth of interoperable radio equipment countywide to help meet this requirement. Interoperability is a process that ensures first responders can successfully communicate with each other- police departments with fire departments, cities with county, and county with state.

A principal “lesson-learned” from the events of Sept. 11, 2001 was the inability of first-responder organizations to communicate during a crisis. Since then millions of dollars have been spent in Galveston County and nationwide upgrading and standardizing radio equipment to ensure the events of 9/11 aren’t repeated.

The January exercise will be the second wide-scale test of radio interoperability in the Houston-Galveston Region in recent months. A similar test involving the Houston area’s Tactical Interoperable Communications Plan was successfully conducted in September. 

In addition to radio interoperability, exercise participants will be expected to demonstrate how they collaborate with other local, regional, state and federal officials during a disaster. In particular, the Houston-Galveston region will test a new regional unified command (RUC), structure mandated by the state to ensure a smoother response to large-scale disasters and potential disasters, such as an approaching hurricane. This “RUC” organization will include representatives from Galveston County and the City of Galveston.