The entire educational community participated in this practical exercise where a emergency or disaster situation so that, in the event of a real event, everyone knows what to do, where to go and what attitudes to take to avoid personal injury.
The City of Children, a socio-educational center of the Augustinian Recollects in Costa Rica, has participated together with many other public and private work centers, educational or long-term stay in the V National Simulation organized by Civil Protection and the Costa Ricans authorities.
On this occasion, an earthquake has been simulated and it took place throughout the country on August 9, Ten O’clock in the morning. It was an exercise of awareness, preparation and evacuation, to strengthen the capacities of the country in general and of the institutions in particular before these seismological emergency situations.
For the correct performance of the drill, a mobile application, a registration form, a series of action protocols, documentation on practices that must be carried out and everything necessary to write or improve the emergency plan of each institution. Sometimes extremely simple activities save many lives, it is enough to know them in advance.
In addition, it detailed how to prepare an emergency kit, how to make the sketches of the different evacuation routes, the different work brigades were appointed, signaled the meeting spaces of the groups to be counted their members and verify disappearances or find out how many people could be in trouble and have not reached the agreed point.
Costa Rica is a country with complicated seismology that suffers more than a thousand earthquakes a month, most of them imperceptible to the human being. Earthquakes occur without warning, so that all the drills and previous plans contribute to saving lives in an effective way.
The greater the learning about what to do at the moment, the faster, safer and more viable it will be the evacuation and control of such imponderable situations.
The drill in the City of the Children produced very positive results. An experience that has also contributed to finding what to improve to achieve even better results. The responsiveness is dramatically and significantly improved when the human community has done previous drills and has learned from them, reinforcing the positive and improving what didn’t go as expected.
