Five firemen approached a worn-down, 90’s Ford sedan parked in the grass and immediately began breaking windows and chopping it to pieces with the Jaws of Life.
As part of READY Long Beach, emergency response teams and city safety departments held demonstrations at Heartwell Park on Saturday in order to help community members become better prepared for real-life disasters.
“You can see that they waste no time in tearing through the car to get to the passengers inside, because in a real life scenario, even seconds count,” said Jake Heflin, a firefighter and program manager for the Long Beach Community Emergency Response Team.
The exposition covered events that ranged from natural disasters like earthquakes, floods and storms, to diseases, virus and even terrorism.
David Ashman, manager of the Disaster Preparedness Bureau, said that Long Beach has never been the victim of a terrorism act, but that it still has the potential to be a target due to the city’s ports.
Attendees at READY Long Beach said that attending the expo better prepared them and their families in the event that something unexpected happens.
Officials also helped prepare families to look for more common occurrences and avoid starting larger disasters.
“[An official] showed us the dial to look at when checking for gas leaks, and we never new about that,” said Sharon Urbano, a mother and Long Beach resident. “We probably would have ran right out to turn the gas off if an earthquake happened. He’s saying not to do that, to check for a leak instead and taught us how to read our own gas meter.”
The event hosted a multitude of booths run by local agencies like the Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Communications Department, survival gear vendor Searchlight Surplus and Survival, woman’s protection vendor Damsel in Defense, the Long Beach Transit Co, the Air Force and Long Beach Search and Rescue.
Event coordinators offered entertainment for children alongside the useful and necessary safety information for adults, creating a zombie walk, where children could dress up like the undead and receive instructions on how to survive a zombie apocalypse, should one ever arise.
Although READY Long Beach is only in its second year, both the public turnout and overall size of the event had grown noticeably since its inception in 2014, Heflin said. Around 200 people were in attendance this year.
“We knew that as a community, we needed to take a more proactive step to increase readiness and resiliency,” Heflin said. “So last year, as an initiative, the Long Beach Fire Department got together and said we need to do something that’s really going to bring this effort to light, so we launched our first READY Long Beach event… and as we look at todays event as it relates to last year, we’ve doubled in size, so we know this is really touching on an unmet need.”