"Zombies" Test Emergency Responders' Mettle in Maine
Zombies took over Bangor, Maine, for a preparedness drill
AP
Bangor, Maine's emergency responders trained last week with an exercise that outfitted Mainers as the undead.
The undead are wreaking havoc in Maine — in a unique emergency preparedness drill, at least.
About 100 first emergency responders from eight counties in Maine were summoned to Bangor to contain a "zombie apocalypse" Thursday in an exercise intended to train them to react to a mass casualty event, the Bangor Daily News reported.
The participants: Bangor residents outfitted with makeup and fake blood to look as "undead" as possible.
In the exercise, the emergency personnel were tasked with treating the zombie-infected participants to prevent them from becoming zombies.
“If they don’t receive the anti-zombie drug, they progress to stage two and then on to the ‘undead’ stage,” Kathy Knight, director of the exercise's organizer Northeastern Maine Regional Resource Center, explained.
The whole point of the exercise, according to Knight, was to get first responders to “think outside the box” in dealing with a potential pandemic scenario.
“This gives us the opportunity to do something a little bit different, but it still has the same principles that would apply in a real situation," Knight told the Bangor Daily News.
"The entire thing is very similar to any regular pandemic influenza planning," she told the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. "So we can use what we learn here in the planning for that type of event."
~http://www.nbcchicago.com/news
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