Happy #ThrowbackThursday! Today takes us back 12 years to the large-scale emerg…

Happy #ThrowbackThursday!

Today takes us back 12 years to the large-scale emergency services 'Multi-Jurisdictional Exercise' (MJEX) held at Whyte Island, Fort Lytton area around the south heads of the Brisbane River in 2008. The Australian Federal Police along with other federal agencies were key organisers of this exercise.

A primary focus of all emergency services is public safety. Since its establishment in 1982, the QAS has worked with other agencies on a multitude of incidents and events requiring the assistance of one or more emergency service organisation. On a similar basis, and by law, the QAS has an obligation to manage its readiness for large-scale incidents and to test the application and coordination of its specialised systems and processes, personnel and physical resources in coordination with its allied emergency services. In effect, these multi-agency exercises test the effectiveness of all services working together to protect public safety in the event of a large-scale disaster or incident.

Early in the morning, at 5.30am on 14th October 2008, the QAS joined other emergency services agencies to participate in the MJEX officially called “Mercury 08”. The purpose of MJEX was to test national counter-terrorism arrangements with a focus on consequence management as well as aspects of high-level decision making, information and intelligence management, recovery and public information arrangements, and counter-terrorism investigations. MJEX included a series of five, one-day workshops commencing earlier in September 2008 and leading into the functional deployment exercise. MJEX required extensive planning by QAS so that the every day responses to community safety issues were not compromised.

These multi-agency exercises are well-embedded into ambulance life and are scheduled periodically so that our operational leaders, paramedics, medical dispatchers along with officers of allied emergency services are exposed to large-scale, multi-causality incident/event response.

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