LANL plans emergency preparedness drill visible across Los Alamos County

Emergency vehicles, workers in protective gear and other drill activity were visible across parts of Los Alamos County as Los Alamos National Laboratory carried out an emergency preparedness exercise that began about 9 a.m. Mountain time and ran roughly six hours. LANL said the point was to test how quickly the people who would respond to a real emergency could mobilize, coordinate, communicate and make decisions under pressure. For residents, commuters and workers, the practical message was simple: visible activity did not by itself mean danger.

The laboratory has a built-in reason to keep drilling. LANL says it sits about 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, spans almost 40 square miles of DOE-owned property and includes almost 900 individual facilities, 13 nuclear facilities and 8.4 million square feet of buildings. In a real event, the lab activates an Emergency Operations Center and a Joint Information Center, then pushes emergency information through its website, official social media, a public information hotline and local television and radio. That is the system residents would depend on if an exercise turned into a real incident.

Los Alamos County’s emergency-management offices are part of that same safety net. The county says its Office of Emergency Management works with other county departments and local, regional, state and federal partners for preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery, and it tells households to be ready to care for themselves for at least 72 hours. The county’s emergency-management documents include the Emergency Operations Plan and the 2023 Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment. In a community where the lab, homes, schools, roads and recreation areas sit close together, that kind of drill can ripple into commuter routes, school pickups and deliveries even when the public is told to take no action.

The drill also comes amid wildfire planning. In March, Los Alamos County launched a prevention campaign built around Ready, Set, Go!, urging residents to know evacuation routes and sign up for emergency alerts. LANL says that if wildfire threatens the site, facilities go through a standardized safe-shutdown process and about 1,200 essential staff may remain on-site to protect assets and materials. The exercise is meant to show whether those warning and evacuation links still hold when the clock is ticking, and whether officials have closed the gaps exposed by past wildfire planning.

That approach is not symbolic. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments reviewed LANL’s 2024 full-participation emergency management exercise, held May 22, 2024, to judge whether Triad National Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration Los Alamos Field Office responded effectively to a simulated operational emergency and protected workers, responders and the public. LANL also runs the annual HAZMAT Challenge, another sign that emergency response at the lab is expected to be practiced, measured and corrected.