It was an exercise in crisis management — literally.
The Office of Emergency Management handed out rations during a mock disaster in Kaiser Park on April 28.
The agency mounts the city’s response to catastrophes, but most of the relief workers come from other city agencies that must work together under unusual circumstances, so the office periodically stages faux calamities to get parks and health department employees used to handing out blankets and dealing with victims, a spokeswoman said.
“It’s a little bit outside of their day-to-day role, so on the back end, they’ve been doing some training,” said Nancy Silvestri of the Office of Emergency Management.
Relief workers handed out self-heating, pre-packaged meals from the city’s Community Emergency Response Team to more than 150 volunteers posing as displaced victims during the disaster drill in Coney Island, Silvestri said.
The office maintains meals complying with an array of special diets — including kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free rations, she said.
And volunteers got a taste of what’s in store the next time a disaster hits when workers whipped up hot meals, she said. And the new rations seem to be an improvement over the previous fare.
“We were testing out the hot food contract by having them eat some of the meals,” Silvestri said. “They went over pretty well — people said they were better than what they had during Sandy.”
The office also rolled out its Interagency Command Center — a bus outfitted with computers, communications equipment, and a mini-fridge that acts as a boots-on-the-ground base for city officials responding to a cataclysm, she said.
