Why the medical teams were especially prepared for last week’s tragedies:
Over the past two years, area hospitals had sent teams of doctors and nurses to citywide training exercises and run internal drills for mass casualty incidents like bombs, plane crashes, and fires. Vivid, citywide disaster simulations – conducted in 2011 and 2012 – put hundreds of officials through hypothetical 24-hour crisis situations. Boston is one of four U.S. cities whose all-hazards plan has been accredited by EMAP, the national emergency planning evaluation program. …
U.S. cities have been doing disaster drills for decades, and some exercises — such as Detroit’s World War II black-out drills or Portland’s 1955 “Operation Greenlight” — have been of some magnitude. But in the last decade, the trend in disaster drills has moved from the purely local exercise to the vertically integrated simulation that coordinates a reponse across the different levels of government. “What is different,” Nelson says, “is the range and depth of missions they’re responding to.”
The Dish 