Ready, Set, DRILL! Red Crossers in 40 Texas & Oklahoma Chapters Get Ready for Multi-State Disaster Drill This Saturday

by Amy Yen, Digital Communications Manager, American Red Cross

Red Crossers across Texas & Oklahoma will
hit the streets in a simulated disaster drill
this weekend

They say practice makes perfect, which is why this weekend, more than 700 volunteers in more than 40 Red Cross chapters across Texas & Oklahoma will be teaming up for our first-ever multi-state disaster drill. In this exercise, volunteers will hit the streets to perform disaster assessment in a simulated devastating tornado outbreak.

In each of the participating chapters, volunteers will be deployed to pre-selected neighborhoods, where they will find a visual of a home that has been impacted. They will have to determine the type of damage and then relay that information back to Red Cross. 

In a real disaster, getting an accurate assessment of impacted homes as quickly as possible is crucial to the disaster relief process. It directs us on everything from how many meals need to be prepared to how many shovels we need to have on hand.

In the Dallas area, volunteers will report to the American Red Cross, 4800 Harry Hines Blvd., Dallas Texas 75235 at 8:15a.m. on Saturday, March 2, participate in a briefing, and then hit the neighborhoods by 9:30a.m. The drill is expected to last until noon, followed by an after-action review from 12:00p.m-2:00p.m. 

In North Texas, wildfires, severe storms, tornados and other disasters are certainly common occurrences. That’s why drills like these are so important: so we can be prepared to help when we’re needed the most.

For information on becoming a trained Red Cross volunteer, go to RedCross.org/DFW. To follow the drill in real-time, follow @RedCrossDFW on Twitter and use hashtag #txokdrill

Here's a map of all of our participating chapters (click to view larger):

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