Dozens of employees along with representatives from Aldine Fire & Rescue, Harris County Sheriff’s Office and the East Aldine Management District participated in a disaster drill on April 6, 2016. The exercise allowed HCEC to test a hypothetical situation, in our case a natural disaster, evaluate our ability to cooperate and work together, test our readiness to respond, and our ability to recover and restore operations.

Our scenario was to prepare to respond to and recover from a storm that resulted in flooding. “Our goal was to create a quality learning environment that will be beneficial to everyone involved and to our organization as a whole,” said Jeremy Hyde, HCEC President and CEO.

Carrying out disaster preparedness exercises is as much about what goes wrong as what goes right.  The executive and management teams will evaluate the outcomes, figure out how to improve on what didn’t work as well as expected and conduct additional exercises with new procedures in place.

“We constantly research current trends, regularly consult other emergency management and public safety officials to draw upon their expertise and experiences, and perform critical evaluations of our own incident experiences to make certain we are exercising the best safety practices available,” said Jeremy.