The 2013 KHTS Emergency Expo puts the Santa Clarita Valley’s disaster preparation resources on public display at the Hyatt Regency Valencia Conference Center parking lot Saturday and Sunday, April 27 and 28.
AM 1220 KHTS, the City of Santa Clarita and Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital joined forces to present the KHTS Emergency Expo. It’s sponsored by American Medical Response and KIA of Valencia and presented in conjunction with KHTS’s 4th annual SCV Home and Garden Show, sponsored by the Southland Regional Association of Realtors, adjacent at the Hyatt in Valencia.
Parking and admission are free for both the Home and Garden Show and the Emergency Expo.
On Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., SCV residents visiting the expo can see displays and watch special presentations and drills by local emergency response teams, as well as check out exhibitors with products and services for emergency preparedness, response and recovery.
Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., the event flashes back to the first-responders of the yore with the first Vintage Emergency Expo, featuring antique emergency equipment and a fleet of vintage vehicles, including KHTS’s 1948 Mack fire engine.
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Sunday morning from 9 to 10, there will be an “Early Access Hour” for special-needs individuals and families. The hour will provide a low-key environment for meeting and greeting, with smaller crowds and less noise for people who are uncomfortable in crowded situations.
First-Responders at the Expo
“We will have a number of SCV first-responders and their equipment there,” said Gary Buterbaugh, whose company, Santa Clarita-based High Impact Event Resources, is producing the KHTS Emergency Expo as well as the KHTS Home and Garden Show and the related RV Show and Kid’s Zone.
“The L.A. County Fire Department, the Highway Patrol, the Sheriff’s Department, American Medical Response — the ambulance service here in town — will all be at the Emergency Expo with their equipment,” he said. “The Southern California Gas Company will be there with their response team, too.”
This year’s KHTS Emergency Expo theme is “Have a Plan, Be Prepared,” Buterbaugh said. “We’d like people who attend to understand emergency preparedness and to be prepared for the next event. But we also see this as a great opportunity for visitors to say hello to and thank the local first responders who do a great job.”
City of Santa Clarita
“In the city booth we’re going to be focusing on hands-on disaster preparation, and we’re going to be asking people to take the preparedness quiz,” said Donna Nuzzi, emergency services supervisor for the City of Santa Clarita.
“You’ll be there with our volunteers helping you answer the questions, and once you complete the quiz you’ll be entered in a drawing, and we’re going to have prizes every hour for people who participate,” she said. “You must be present to win. It’s just a way to review what you’re personally doing with your family preparedness.”
Nuzzi referenced the city’s extensive disaster preparedness information online at www.santa-clarita.com/emergency, but sees the Emergency Expo as a more social way for members of the community to interact on disaster preparedness.
“Instead of just going on the Internet and looking, you’re going to have the opportunity to actually talk with people directly and hands-on look at products, and get an idea of what you might need or maybe look at the gaps that you might have in your own supplies,” she said.
Henry Mayo
As they did at the KHTS Emergency Expo last year, medical teams from Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital will set up a “surge” tent, meant to be assembled fast in the field to handle a large influx, or surge, of patients after a disaster, like an earthquake or flood.
“It’s a tent about 18 by 24 feet that can handle about 10 gurneys, so there will be 10 patients, and another 10 chairs, so there would be about 20 patients per tent,” said Terry Stone, who oversees the hospital’s safety and emergency management services. “We have multiple tents like this, so this is just one of our tents. Last year, we put some mannequins in the gurneys and set it up with linen and some vital sign machines and some other equipment to make it look pretty functional.”
The Henry Mayo teams will also hand out free personal family disaster preparedness plans.
“It’s very easy to fill out, and has a magnet on the back, so it can be placed on your refrigerator so it’s always easily accessible,” Stone said. “We can even help people fill them out. We will also be doing a demonstration of some of our evacuation equipment, so in the event part of our facility is damaged and we have to evacuate a unit or a department, we would demonstrate how a patient would be evacuated down the staircase and out of the building. We practice that all the time (at the hospital) as part of our fire drills and exercises, so we’ll be demonstrating that equipment.”
Stone added The Gas Company will have a mock gas meter on display, “so we can teach people how to take a wrench and turn the gas off,” to prevent the spread of fire after a disaster.
“And then we have an old, beat-up water heater that we use to teach people how they can extract 40 gallons of portable water out of their water heater,” she said. “A lot of people don’t realize they have water to drink, as well as for other things, in their water heater. They just need to do certain things to make sure the water heater stays clean and know how to get the water out when they need to.”
Vintage Emergency Expo
Sunday’s inaugural Vintage Emergency Expo is a fundraiser for the Callahan Heartsafe Project, named after the late Los Angeles Fire Department Chief John W. Callahan, a longtime Santa Clarita resident. The project’s mission is to establish awareness, education and immediate access to automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout our community for emergency treatment of heart attacks.
“We’re starting what we hope will be a new tradition in Santa Clarita with the Vintage Emergency Expo,” Buterbaugh said. “We’ll have police cars, ambulances — in fact, we’ve got a 1929 ambulance coming. We’ve got, of course, the KHTS fire truck and another 1948 Mack fire truck coming. We have some others lined up as well.”
All vintage emergency vehicle, apparatus or equipment owners are welcome to display. Display registration for the Sunday event is only $50, and all Vintage Emergency Expo registration fees, as well as public donations, go to the Callahan HeartSafe Project.
Home and Garden Show
This year’s KHTS Home and Garden Show, sponsored by the Southland Regional Association of Realtors, Valencia Kia and Home Depot, along with the Emergency Expo sponsored by the city, Henry Mayo, The Gas Company and KHTS, is shaping up to be even more successful than last year’s, when the weather was rainy and chilly, Buterbaugh said.
“We hope by moving it back a full month, that we’ll get much better weather,” Buterbaugh said. “We still had good attendance last year, even considering the circumstances. People were quite happy about the show, both the exhibitors and the attendees. But we’re hoping this year will be even a bigger and better show, and with the new additions of the Vintage Emergency Expo, a bigger Kids Zone – we enlarged the Kids Zone, too. We think those two things will be a boost to attendance as well.”
Another highlight of the weekend’s events will be a “Plant Mania” sale on Sunday.
“We’ll have a number of nurseries there, and on Saturday, of course, they’ll be selling their plants and giving their plants away, too,” Buterbaugh said. “But on Sunday, they don’t want to take any of those plants home back to the nursery, so that’s usually a day of fine super-bargains on plants.”
Buterbaugh credits the events’ success to support from the Santa Clarita Valley business community.
“We’ve got a lot of fine merchants and home and garden professionals right here in the Santa Clarita Valley,” he said. “You don’t have to go to big national firms, you don’t have go even over the hill if you don’t want to. We’ve got some very fine people here in our community who do a great job, and they’re our neighbors, too.”
Buterbaugh promises a weekend of family-friendly fun. “And the price is right for admission and parking,” he said. “You can win a lot of prizes. There are drawings, giveaways, specials, specially priced products and services. So come and shop locally and thank our first-responders.”
For more info and a complete schedule, visit the Emergency Expo main page on the KHTS website at www.HometownStation.com.
• Article: KHTS Emergency Expo Showcases Santa Clarita Valley Disaster Preparation
• Source: Health and Beauty
• Author: Stephen K. Peeples