Various public safety officials are conducting an exercise today that will see a road closure affecting motorists in Dallas County. 

(Highway R22) T Avenue between 190th and 180th Street is closed today from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. to allow for public safety officials to conduct an exercise. Dallas County Emergency Management Coordinator A.J. Seely says the simulation will be of a car crash that will trigger a mass casualty response.

“The exercise is a simulated motor vehicle collision. As we’ve seen across Iowa in the last couple years there’s been quite a few vehicle pile ups just due to blowing snow conditions and so what we are simulating, despite being August, is going to be a winter storm that causes a motor vehicle accident that has a set number of patients.”

Seely tells Raccoon Valley Radio it’s important to allow public safety officials the opportunity to validate the procedures and practices and training they work hard on on a regular basis. 

“It’s that last step in verifying that what we’ve done is working and is going to work when it actually gets called into use. Typically, during exercises we do also come up with some revisions. So, it does also drive future response training for us and sometimes policy revisions as well so that we can make sure that we are responding like we need to.”

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