MONTREAL – Is the city ready to deal with a major catastrophe?
That’s something health officials tried to determine on Wednesday as they held a surprise emergency drill in downtown Montreal.
They reacted to a fake explosion inside the subway, and as Domenic Fazioli reports, nurses and doctors at two major hospitals were suddenly faced with a nightmare scenario.
Although it looked and sounded like the real thing – it wasn’t.
For a part of the morning on Wednesday, officials across the city carried out an emergency drill. It’s goal? To test how the network would respond to a “code orange” alert.
A code orange is an internationally used alert is reserved for major event – like a plane crash or a building collapse.
In Wednesday’s operation, officials pretended that there had been an explosion inside a downtown metro station during morning rush hour.
Seventy-nine victims (played by actors) were brought to the Montreal General and Children’s hospitals and hundreds of people were involved in the preparation of the exercise, which took ten months to coordinate.
In Montreal’s history, there have been only two code oranges declared – the first on December 6, 1989 for the École Polytechnique Massacre and the other on September 13, 2006 for the Dawson College shooting.
To view photos from the simulation, visit our Facebook page by clicking here.
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