Over the past few years outbreaks like the H1-N1 virus and even last year's pertussis blowup have shown emergency crews that they need to be ready. It's a concern on Fort Drum as well as soldiers coming back from Afghanistan could bring something back. As our Brian Dwyer reports, it's an issue the post and communities are trying to tackle together.

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FORT DRUM, N.Y. -- The scenario is this, a flight of 200 soldiers coming back from a year in Afghanistan. But a number of them showing signs of SARS.

"Prior to 9-11, we had very minimal contingency programs ready to go. Since then, each year, there's been drill after drill trying to come up with new situations we may have to address," Samaritan Medical Center Resident Physician Aaron Campbell said.

In this drill, soldiers working with various local emergency crews, need to isolate the soldiers. Find the sickest ones and get them to help.

"Since Fort Drum basically doesn't have a hospital on post, it becomes a good opportunity for some of the community hospitals to participate in the care of the soldiers," Campbell added.

And a drill like this can be rather interesting. You want it to go smoothly and do everything right, but the goal of this is to learn and you can't do that without some mistakes.

"When we plan these exercises do we actually want to fail a little bit? The answer is yes. In the planning stages what we're going to do is create the framework for the exercise, but what we don't want to do is feed the right answer to our participants," Lt. Col. Douglas

And it's those participants who are coming from all parts of Fort Drum, not just medics.

"If we had to house 200 soldiers here for a number of days, these guys have to eat and we have to make sure they have places to sleep and what not. It's not just the medical pieces that we're exercising," Badzik said.

The soldiers say keeping a virus like SARS contained and not letting it get around the post, especially not outside the gates, is a massive priority.

Fort Drum met with the local emergency crews about 10 different times over the past few months to set this drill up.