• By Todd Luck
• Posted Friday, March 11, 2022

Forsyth County participates in Planetary Defense exercise

About 160 participants from 40 local, regional, state, and federal partners took part in a Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise, sponsored by NASA and FEMA, that was held at The Benton Convention Center last month.

The local attendees communicated remotely with officials who were participating at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland and presented the scenario for the tabletop exercise, which involved as asteroid impact threat to Earth.

There are no predicted asteroid impact threats to our planet for the foreseeable future, but the exercise lets officials identify and resolve potential issues that could arise in that scenario. The exercise was the first one to do an end-to-end simulation of the scenario, from discovery to aftermath.

Participants from Forsyth Government included representatives from Emergency Services, City/County Emergency Management, City/County Utilities, Sheriff’s Office, MapForsyth, Public Health, Social Services, General Services and Smith Reynolds Airport. Many representatives from other local public and private organizations also participated, including the City of Winston-Salem, Novant Health, Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, Duke Power, Red Cross and many others.

For more information on the exercise and NASA’s effort to predict and prevent asteroid impacts, visit https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-fema-other-us-partners-simulate-asteroid-impact-response