PORT CLINTON — The Davis-Besse nuclear plant and a number of local agencies that support its operations got flying colors from federal regulators Friday for their collective efforts in emergency planning.

The Ottawa County power station, 30 miles east of Toledo and along the Lake Erie shoreline, turned in one of its best performances ever for a biennial training exercise that is effectively a dress rehearsal for an evacuation. Its latest drill was held Tuesday and involved nearly 400 people, from control-room operators to firefighters and teachers. The plant is owned by FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron.

The training exercises may be subject to tweaking in the future, depending on what a national task force learns from the lessons of the March 11 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said.

They were created in response to the evacuation problems that arose in 1979, following the half-core meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in Pennsylvania.

“I want to make this very, very clear that you guys did well in this exercise,” Stephen Tulley, a Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector in charge of the drill, told 50 people who attended Friday’s debriefing in the Ottawa County Emergency Operations, located in the basement of the Ottawa County Courthouse in downtown Port Clinton.

First Published May 13, 2011, 7:32 p.m.