[MDC-EC] 2011 MD Statewide Pandemic Flu Drill

[Jim Montgomery]

To all MDC Section ECs, AECs and ARES operators:

PRGE ARES is requesting exercise EmComm mutual aid during the subject exercise.

Our involvement in the multi-day exercise is Tuesday May 3 from 0800L to 1400L.  Five county hospitals, the County EOC and the county health dept will be staffed with ARES operators.  Instead of listing all the winlink email addresses for those venues, we have set up a winlink email clearing house at our ARES callsign, W3PGC.  Send exercise traffic to W3PGC at winlink dot org from any email domain and our ARES exercise controller will deliver (forward) it to its destination.  You may specify traffic to a specific hospital or general traffic to all participants, your choice.  For those outside the winlink domain, be sure to place //WL2K at  the beginning of the subject line.

The following PRGE facilities are being staffed;

Doctors Hospital, Lanham, MD
Ft Washington Medical Center, Ft Washington, MD
Laurel Regional Hospital, Laurel, MD
Prince George's Health Dept, co-located at PRGE EOC
Prince George's Hospital Center, Cheverly, MD
PRGE EOC, Landover Hills, MD
Southern Maryland Hospital Center, Clinton, MD

PRGE ARES is looking to see who might be available as an 'exercise mutual aid' component of this drill.  First line in the body of the message should be, "THIS IS IS A DRILL."  Just a note to tell us that you are "available to support the pandemic flu exercise providing mutual aid, standing by for a reply", would suffice.  Good luck wishes, are OK too!  Exercise traffic received by noon should receive a response the same day.  If our reply back to you needs to be routed to an alternate address, please state.  Please sign traffic with name, callsign, ARES position, ARES group name and county.  Previous county exercises have always ended early.

PRGE ARES would like to receive as many emails as possible to test our ability to handle and move large amounts of traffic in an expeditious manner.  If there are problems during the exercise, we'll have to come up with a solution before a real event occurs.

This should be fun.  Let's how this might work.  I will report back to the group how successful the responses were for mutual aid.

Thanks for you time and we hope to hear from you during the drill.

Jim Montgomery
WB3KAS
PRGE EC
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