The staging area was set up at the Nagaland stadium Dimapur while Pantaloons, Forest Department Residenti area, Government High school Lingrijan and GHS Sarbura were the incident sites during the mock exercise.

The siren was triggered at 9 am as information regarding the occurrence of a hypothetical earthquake of magnitude 8.7 on the Richer scale in Dimapur was received at the District Emergency Operation center. Thereafter, the Responsible Officer briefed the Command staff after which the Incident commander along with the other Incident Response Team rushed to the staging area to take stock of the situation and resource mobilization.

Reports from incident sites started coming to the District Emergency Operation center where the RO conveyed the incident reports to the Incident Commander and Information Officer and passed them on to the Operation Section Chief.

During the mock drill, there were three deaths, nine were seriously injured and eight sustained minor injuries, all of whom were evacuated and given medical attention from the hospital. The bodies were kept in the mortuary.

During the debriefing, ADC Dimapur, who was the Incident Commander, said that such mock drills are conducted for testing the Preparedness level for evaluating the resource statistics of the stakeholder departments. She further said that mock drills are necessary for coordinating the activities of various agencies for their optimum utilization and also for using the feedback for identifying gaps to improve the resource capabilities for facing actual disasters.

NEPEx exercise at Dimapur was organized by the District Disaster Management Authority Dimapur in collaboration with NSDMA, NDRF, and SDRF.

(DPRO Dimapur)