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Simcoe County and partners work together to prepare for emergency situations

October 30, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Preparing for an emergency requires regional collaboration, planning, coordination, and partnerships to be successful.

In 2005, the County of Simcoe established a committee to proactively plan and bring together emergency managers and response personnel from local municipalities and partner organizations to coordinate emergency planning in the region.

Simcoe County Warden Basil Clarke joined Ontario Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response, Jill Dunlop, to welcome emergency responders from across Ontario to the County’s annual Simcoe Emergency Response Conference, held on Oct. 17.  

They acknowledged emergency responders for their efforts during the ice storm earlier this year.

The Simcoe Emergency Response Committee has grown to include representatives from over 45 organizations, including local municipalities, emergency services, volunteer organizations, hospitals, public health, education, conservation authorities, and utilities.

The meeting included presentations of flood risks, a showcase of the volunteers involved with Georgian Bay Volunteer Search and Rescue, mass fatality planning, and key lessons learned during Ottawa’s May 2022 Derecho response.  A Derecho is a long-lived, fast-moving thunderstorm that causes widespread wind damage.

With Simcoe County’s commitment to emergency management and public safety in mind, the County has focused on training and preparing communities across the region to respond to a variety of possible emergencies. From large, complex county-wide simulations to target municipal occurrences, the County is ensuring that Emergency Management’s mission is upheld across the region.

This conference is the latest in a series of emergency management training sessions held across the region this year, including simulations in Alliston, Orillia, and Oro-Medonte, to test and improve response protocols and train emergency responders in simulated real-world scenarios.

During these training exercises, emergency responders were asked to test their response protocols through a variety of simulations, including a mass-casualty incident in June, a hazardous materials incident in September, and an emergency social services shelter operation in October.

These exercises were large-scale, involving multiple agencies from across the region.

In addition to large-scale exercises, the County has been proactively running Local Area Municipality Training and Tabletop Exercises to ensure preparedness at the municipal level to reinforce local emergency plans across the region.

The County’s emergency management program helps create disaster-resilient communities ready to meet the challenges of emergencies that may arise across the region. 

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