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GREENSBORO — With the sun blazing across Guilford County and temperatures soaring into the low 90s, county emergency officials spent Wednesday dealing with a massive ice storm.

A mass power outage forced High Point Regional Hospital to resort to a back up generator, which failed too.

Residents had to be evacuated from nursing homes without power. Downed power lines, trees and car crashes were showing up everywhere.

And West Wendover Avenue had to be shut down in both directions because ice made it impassable.

Or at least, that’s what the computers in emergency command centers said.

It was all part of a the a county-wide training exercise to test emergency officials preparedness to a mass emergency scenario.

The response was being evaluated by officials with Envirosafe, an emergency consulting firm.

Officials with Guilford County, Greensboro and High Point set up command centers, fielded simulated 911 calls and worked together on the appropriate responses as they would if 3 to 4 inches of ice blanketed in the area.

“It’s a behind the scenes look at everything we have during a large-scale event,” said David Douglas, assistant chief with the Greensboro Fire Department.

“It assures us a coordinated response that addresses the needs of the citizens and allows us to mitigate those problems that are real emergencies immediately.”

The day-long scenario included everything short of putting vehicles on the road to respond to calls.

Inside the Greensboro emergency command center on North Church Street, a 911 call would come in and be regulated to the appropriate agency be police, fire or someone else.

Fire and police personnel prioritized calls and other city departments had representatives available to respond to situations as needed.

Parks and Recreation officials were on hand to dispatch workers to remove downed trees. Public relations officials fielded mock calls from the media.

And city engineers stood ready to evaluate a building damaged by fire to decide if it was inhabitable or needed to be condemned.

Curveballs were also being thrown all day. With unexpected equipment failures, communications problems and more, things that always seem to happen no matter how prepared officials thought they were.

Similiar coordination was going at command centers for the county and in High Point.

“I see a lot of positives and everyone is working together,” said John Glenn, an evaluator with Envirosafe.

“In a real life scenario (Guilford County, Greensboro and High Point) will have to mesh together.”

Department heads will take the review by the consultants to see what areas they performed well and work on where they need improvement.

“A lot of people don’t understand the mechanisms that are in place to respond (to a disaster)” Douglas said.

“We have a mechanism in place to process the information, prioritize it and respond to it and that’s essentially what this is.”

“If we get a hurricane next week, this same process is going to take place.”

Contact Ryan Seals at 373-7077 or ryan.seals@news-record.com