RICHARDSON, TX (1080 KRLD) - Verizon is training this week at its office in Richardson for its response to a potential disaster in Texas. Forty-one members of the Verizon's "Major Emergency Response Incident Team (MERIT)" are working on a response to a Category 3 hurricane making landfall.
Verizon says workers are responding to a widespread power outage that would include one of its technical facilities. The simulation has a generator failing, and the facility turns to battery back-up.
"When the storm clears, we're sending technicians in to see if they can repair the generator and see what the state of our equipment is when they notice a noxious fume and noxious cloud in the building," says Verizon's Mark Paff.
Paff says the crew evacuates the building and calls for the MERIT team which responds with Hazmat suits and other equipment to determine if any chemicals were in the air.
"They were able to determine our batteries, some of them are defective, steaming off gases that are toxic," he says. "Their mission is going to be to ventilate the area, to get those fumes out of the building and replace those batteries with new ones to create a safe environment for our technicians to go in and repair the generator."
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Paff says disaster training takes place across the country and will cover the possibility of different types of issues. He says Verizon works with police and fire departments in many cities to coordinate their response and also to ensure first responders will have access to telecommunications service as quickly as possible.
"They have a certain language they speak, they have certain protocols they follow. This team is trained on all of them, so they can embed themselves with first responders," he says.
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