Yesterday, I happened to come across This Notice of an Emergency Preparedness Exercise the city will be conducting this Sunday:

On Sunday, June 24, 2007, local, state and national officials are conducting an exercise to test the delivery of emergency medicine.

Postal carriers will deliver small, empty, cardboard boxes that represent medication to approximately 52,000 households in the Germantown (19144), Fairmount (19130), and Boulevard (19149) areas of Philadelphia. A Philadelphia Police Department officer will be with each postal carrier as part of the test.

For this test, this empty box is meant to represent emergency medications that would prevent people from becoming sick from a bioterrorist attack.

I posted a diary over at DailyKos making fun of the whole idea of testing whether or not the Postal Service has the capacity to deliver small parcels to three zip codes, of having police accompany them, and of the surreal idea of passing out empty boxes 'representing' actual medicine.

Well, lo and behold, someone with the city who is involved in planning this exercise responded to that diary, defending it. I think it is a worthy debate, so I wanted to share it here in the hopes that some of you will join in. Here is what he or she posted:

I feel that I have a duty to stand up and say something.

A bit about me first. I'm the first person to roll my eyes at the ridiculous things that DHS, CDC and FEMA make us do. Seriously, you guys who don't deal with this everyday have no idea how bad it really is. I have the same low tolerance for DHS wastes of money and time that you all do.

That said, this is not a DHS production. There will be a DHS observer, but they've done none of the planning.

The exercise is being run by a Philadelphia City Department and the USPS in order to test the feasibility of this particular plan for distributing mass prophylaxis. Yes, it's true it's not our first plan, and a lot of other cities and counties have dismissed it out of hand as undoable, but we think that we can do it, and want to see if this is an effective backup plan.

The plan is for USPS mail carriers to deliver boxes representing prophylaxis to every household in three zip codes this Sunday. The boxes will be accompanied by a single sheet describing the exercise. The box is the same shape and size as a bottle of prophylaxis and the sheet represents a sheet that would be distributed as instructions for taking the medication. The purpose of the exercise is to see if a mail carrier can deliver these two things in a reasonable amount of time without being overburdened. If he/she can, then this might be a plausible way to distribute prophylaxis in a shelter-in-place emergency. The police officers are there in order to as closely simulate what such a distribution would look like. If a biological event happened and mailmen were walking around with antibiotics, they would need to be protected, the police are there to provide that.

I'll keep an eye on this post throughout the day in order to provide more information as you guys need it.

I assure that this is a serious exercise and a lot of good people worked for a very long time to set this up. And I assure you that those folks are concerned with nothing but the best interests of the citizens of Philadelphia with this exercise.

And here is how I responded to that response:

I appreciate you taking the time to expand our understanding of this exercise.

In response to the concerns of several other commenters, I did check out the demographic characteristics of these three zip codes. One is predominantly white, one predominantly minority, and one roughly equal between white and minority.

In addition, I see you've chosen three neighborhoods with varying housing situations. One is primarily row homes, one is about one-half detached and semi-detached homes, while a third has a number of high-rise condos.

Since you have selected three differing and balancing zipcodes, I'd say it is indeed evident that a lot of thought was put into creating this exercise.

Still, I have to say, I'm not wholly convinced that this exercise will have any meaning. There are plenty of examples of the post office delivering large amounts of roughly identical mailings simultaneously. Certainly everyone's tax forms arrive in a small window of time, going to every address. Campaign mailings achieve mass same-day delivery, again going to every address. Social security checks and holiday deliveries are also high-volume mailings in a compressed period of time, though admittedly not to every address on the same day.

You make no mention of individual household demographics. Will the postal deliverers just be dropping off the boxes? This would be an unhelpful exercise: without knowing the number of people living at an address, there would be know way of knowing how much medicine to drop off. Without knowing the ages of the residents, there would be no way of determining different dosage needs. Or are you planning to just drop off an equal amount of medicine at each address, assuming a certain average number of residents? This would be wasteful, would leave some homes short-changed, while others had a surplus.

So then maybe they'll be knocking on every door, asking how many people live there, and their ages, so as to determine how much to drop off? Very time-consuming.

Will this exercise be an accurate measure of just how time-consuming that would be? Well, perhaps the time needed to explain to everyone exactly why a mail carrier and a cop are at the door handing them an empty box is roughly equivalent to the time, in an actual emergency, it would take to explain the purpose of the medicine to a panicky household. Or perhaps not. I doubt this exercise will give anything at all like a true measure of the time factor that would be involved.

Your point about police protection in an actual emergency is valid. But again, walking around on a placid sunny summer Sunday will give no true indication of what the delivery system would face confronted by a genuinely panicked and desperate populace.

I still think this exercise sounds like a waste of time and money, and will produce little in the way of valid data for emergency planning.

Nevertheless, thank you again for your response, and I hope you will offer some further information.

Any thoughts?

UPDATE: The city person who worked on this exercise has posted an additional response with further details over on my original post at DailyKos. I have to admit, he or she makes a persuasive case, though I still have my doubts (and wonder as well what all this is costing.) I'm not going to paste in the new response here, as it is lengthy, but urge you to go have a look. Thanks!