Emergency Preparedness Week may be old news for most, but for the Town's emergency services being prepared never comes to an end.

Earlier this week members of the town, emergency services and representatives of the utility companies came together to run through a mock disaster scenario.

Okotoks Fire Chief Ken Thevenot says they do this run through to find potential problems in their plans.

"We made up a scenario to present to the other staff of approximately 30 people that attended. The scenario was of course flooding, that had breached the west side of town and had really high numbers for flow rates." Thevenot says "It caused us some problems with evacuating people and figuring out where we take them."

Every year organizers come up with a different scenario.

Thevenot says over the past years there has been some pretty disastrous scenarios.

"Last year was a train derailment, the year before was a tornado we've also done an ice storm. We haven't touched this one in a few years and thought it was relevant, so this year we actually did a flood scenario."

Many challenges presented themselves through out the evening, Thevenot said the were reminded of how important structure and services are in times of emergency and learned where to focus their energy.

"Some of the things it reinforced for us was protecting our assets. Things like the water treatment centre, and our municipal centre." Thevenot adds "We want to continue running services for our citizens even in those kind of circumstances we wanted to have redundancy plans in place."

The Town does intend to continue these mock disaster role plays, and says it's better to be prepared.

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