Starting at 8 a.m., Placer County Sheriff's Office and CAL Fire held the East Placer Unified Command Training at Palisades Tahoe.
"This is the time to meet in a beautiful day at a parking lot. Shake hands. See each other, familiarize ourselves with the process," said Ryan Woessner, Assistant Chief, CAL Fire.
"It's a good way to meet people now and not out in the field," said Ty Conners, Lieutenant, Placer County Office of Emergency Management.
The training brought 20 different fire and law enforcement agencies to test about 100 people in real life scenarios of fire breaking out.
"Well they all have a common key point that it's going into the vegetation and it's burning towards communities to set up for a multi agency evacuation," Woessner said.
How they work together is, the firefighters are dictating the fire, how it's moving and the conditions.
Then they call for the evacuations, while they focus on how to handle the burning flames.
Law enforcement then comes in and decides where the best evacuation points will be, and where to possibly move them to.
However, both are working together, to decide what works best for the given situation.
After each scenario, some of the trainees said it got better.
"I'd like to think they got smoother as the day moved on, but the proctors were pretty good about keeping us on our toes and hitting on some different points that we might have missed in the earlier scenarios," said Steve Kessmann, Trainee and Fire Marshal for Truckee Fire Protection District.
Kessmann says in a real life situation, these events in the scenarios happen in about a 24 hour period, but for the training it's condensed down to about 30 minutes.
Some trainees said it was quite challenging.
"Probably all the information coming in at once," said Sage Bourassa, trainee and Sergeant for Placer County Sheriff's Office. "We try to do these realistic and these trainings. So, you're getting phone calls from people with odd stuff. You have folks walking up to you and interrupting you and you're missing radio calls and you don't get the chance to ask the question or finish what you were working. So, it's just trying to get your brain to focus on what's important."
By the end of the training, supervisors say the trainees come a long way.
"We can see the confidence that we build in all of the students that go through this," Woessner said. "Whether they have 20 years on the job or five years on the job. They're coming away with this with a little bit more a comfort level for when it happens in real life."
While the training helps these agencies, they are also asking for the community's help by creating defensible space around their homes.
