Success Stories

ORAU Leads Operations to Test Emergency Preparedness in California during the Golden Guardian (GG) 2008

With success of Golden Guardian (GG) 2006 and 2007, Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU)—the emergency planning experts—once again served alongside the California Emergency Management Agency, other branches of California government and the U.S. Geological Survey to execute Golden Guardian 2008 (GG08).

Consisting of operational and discussion-based exercises, GG08 was designed to evaluate local, state and federal responses to a natural disaster involving a catastrophic, 7.8-magnitude earthquake along the San Andreas Fault in southern California.

Extensive use of the California Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (CHSEEP) toolkit, which ORAU assisted in developing, was used throughout the drill to strengthen and enforce the exercise, as well as to give local jurisdictions and other agencies the ability to develop their own exercises for other type of incidents.

But GG08 was not a stand-alone exercise. Instead, other community activities and national drills were conducted concurrently with GG08.

One example of such simultaneous activity included GG08’s participation alongside Southern California's "Dare to Prepare" year-long campaign used to raise earthquake awareness and encourage readiness.

Another example included GG08’s link to the U.S. Northern Command’s Exercise Vigilant Shield 2009, which is part of a homeland security program designed to test the coordinated response to complex, large-scale incidents.

A third exercise concurrent to GG08 involved ORAU senior operations planners taking the lead developing a functional exercise in South Lake Tahoe, Nev., which assessed the continuity of government operations, urban search and rescue and fatality management.

This event, which occurred one week prior to GG08, focused on mitigating the effects of a seiche wave (an inland body of water tsunami) that resulted from an earthquake in the local mountain ranges.

The exercise involved planners from several California counties, the city of South Lake Tahoe and local and state agencies from both California and Nevada.

Lessons learned from these exercises are being used as the basis for planning and implementing Golden Guardian (GG) 2009, whose focus will be ports/maritime security at multiple California locations.