In response to the Cities of Marshalltown and Pella being devastated by tornadoes last summer, Adair and Guthrie County Emergency Management will be conducting an exercise to prepare local agencies in responding to a similar situation this Saturday.

Those around Fontanelle and Greenfield may see a lot of commotion as local nursing homes will practice evacuations and Cardinal Glass Industries will train their internal emergency response team in a situation where their facilities may be damaged by severe weather.

Adair and Guthrie County Emergency Management Coordinator Bob Kempf says several fire and first responder agencies will be involved in this full-scale exercise, “Definitely the ones from Bridgewater, Fontanelle, Greenfield. We’ll have others that will be helping not necessarily with the physical response, but we have people that are pretending to be patients, we have people that are pretending to be bystanders, and then we have to evaluate the exercise to kind of see how we did. So we’ll bring in some of our responders and some of our people from Guthrie County will come down, just like the Adair County people came up last year and helped us in Guthrie County.”

Kempf adds, those from Guthrie County will be on hand to evaluate how the exercise went and suggest what agencies and emergency management can do better in a disaster situation. Kempf says the exercise will begin at about 9 a.m. and last through the afternoon.