Exercise Maritime Response (EXMR): lessons learned for population monitoring and communications

Exercise Maritime Response was the third in a series of four emergency response exercises sponsored by the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Research and Technology Initiative. It was designed to test the Canadian Federal, Provincial and Municipal response to a terrorist attack using radioactive materials. The complexity of this exercise had been increased over previous exercises to now include simulated contaminated members of the public. This paper summarizes the experiences, and the lessons learned, of the Health Canada (HC) team. The largest issues identified by the HC team were: crowd control, insufficiency of staff to deal with surge capacity, and communications. The exercise did prove that the population monitoring equipment worked well and that small amounts of radioactivity were easily identified and quantified to within 20% of their true value.