鈥淓xercise. Exercise. Bomb threat at the 91大黄鸭 airport. Bomb threat at the 91大黄鸭 airport.鈥�

With those words broadcast around the city just before 9 a.m. Thursday, a safety preparedness exercise of explosive proportions was launched behind the airport.

鈥淥peration Collaborate鈥� brought BC Ambulance, 91大黄鸭, Lake Country and Ellison fire departments, emergency health services and UBC Okanagan together to fight a common foe, an imaginary 鈥渄isgruntled passenger.鈥�

Working in tandem they dealt with smoke, fire and actors playing hostages, a corpse and the aforementioned problematic passenger.

鈥淭he scenario started with a disgruntled passenger, then there鈥檚 a security component and it escalated from that security component to smoke coming from the airplane,鈥� said Sam Samaddar, airport director, explaining the scene presented to reporters who had gathered to watch the exercise.

鈥淭here鈥檚 an internal threat component, which is part of the exercise and there will be a fire component as the smoke builds into something much bigger.鈥�

Basically a passenger starts revealing himself as a threat, people are injured, the plane is shipped over an isolation area where a fire lights up the sky and firefighters knock it down. Someone dies, although nobody was told from what.

It was very dramatic, and highlighted how well equipped the city is to contain an airport threat quickly and efficiently.

鈥淲e don鈥檛 want to contaminate the rest of the populations or bring a threat to other aircraft coming or arriving,鈥� said Samaddar, who noted that much of the event was built from fragments of real world incidents.

While the exercise was built on foreign scenarios,  91大黄鸭 isn鈥檛 immune to issues of this kind.

鈥淭hat was a real incident where an individual, because he was late for his airplane, decided to call in a bomb threat,鈥� he said.

鈥淲e didn鈥檛 know who the individual was, but we activated our emergency procedures plan and contacted the RCMP.鈥�

Typically with these kinds of incidents, Samaddar said, you don鈥檛 actually find out the person behind it, but in this case the airport was up and running within three hours of the threat.

鈥淭hrough our systems 鈥� our closed circuit TV, our telephone logging devices 鈥� we were able to track and apprehend that individual.鈥�

When all was said and done, Samaddar said the event went well, although a debriefing to get a real grasp on department performance was set to happen after news crews departed.

These large scale emergency exercises are conducted every four years to test YLW鈥檚 airport emergency response plan.