El Paso hosts radiation preparedness exercise

Imagine a 10 kiloton nuclear bomb explodes in Downtown El Paso.

It’s a terrifying scenario, but how prepared is El Paso to deal with a catastrophe of this nature?

The director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, Andrew Roszack, was in El Paso Thursday and met with local health officials to conduct the nation’s first emergency preparedness exercise.

Roszack made it very clear this is a project that has been in the works since 2012 and has nothing to do with the radiation leak at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

He says it’s important to get every agency and organization — from school districts to law enforcement — on the same page:

“This was a unique environment for us to come and learn and that’s why we chose El Paso,” Roszack said. “For us, it worked out pretty well because we got a lot of interest. And I’m not confident we would have gotten so much interest had Carlsbad not been in the news as much as it has been in the last couple of days.”