OPERATION
HOTPLATE
Multi-year initiative to address intentional food contamination culminates in first-of-its-kind exercise
Story & Photography by: Julia Regeski
G
eorgia has a reputation as a food producing
powerhouse, but thanks to a multi-year,
multi-agency initiative designed to facilitate
response to food emergencies, the state will
soon be known for its groundbreaking approach to a
previously unexplored arena.
Led by the Georgia Department of Agriculture’s
Rapid Response Team, an initiative centered on
bettering emergency response to an intentional
contamination of food culminated on August 16, which
marked the final day of a two-day full scale exercise at
the Guardian Center. The exercise brought together
themes like intelligence sharing, detection and forensics
discussed in previous exercises workshops, and was
complete with a mock decontamination station and
transport stop.
“We are the first state to
do a civilian radiological
food contamination
exercise.”
-Ray Doyle, Senior Research Scientist
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Jeff Morrison, Program Manager with the Geor-
gia Emergency Management and Homeland Security
Agency’s Radiological Emergency Preparedness Pro-
18 | September 2018
gram, served in multiple leadership roles throughout
the exercise.
“The selection of radiological material as the
source of the contamination increased the level of
complexity within the response,” said Morrison. “Other
than specialized nuclear power industry exercises,
radiological contamination within the emergency
response community is not as well understood as the
more common threats which are seen and exercised
more often.”
GDA utilized several critical partnerships to ensure
the exercise yielded impetus for improvement. Funding
was provided through a Rapid Response Team grant
obtained through the Food and Drug Administration,
while long term support was provided by the Georgia
Tech Research Institute.
“We are the first state to do a civilian radiological
food contamination exercise,” said Ray Doyle, senior
research scientist at the GTRI. “There’s a lot of interest
in this nationally because it’s unique. We have a lot of
federal agencies that are involved because they’ve never
had the opportunity to practice this way.”
Doyle has been involved in planning since before
the first tabletop exercise in 2016, as well as with a 2017
public information workshop and another tabletop held
at a real, working U.S. Foods distribution facility.
“It’s a low risk, high consequence event,” said Venessa
Sims, emergency management director at GDA, who led
the exercises’ planning. Sims was deliberate in bringing
together the many agencies that would respond in
a real-life scenario of this type such as the Georgia
Department of Public Health, the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
US Department of Agriculture and many more.
“Any contamination scenario which impacts the state
of Georgia’s agricultural, food processing, and food