Officials Say Idaho Mass Casualty Drill Went `Without a Hitch`
Dec. 05--Twenty-four people were painted with fake blood, lacerations, protruding bones and some even posed as fatalities Saturday morning for one of the largest mass casualty drills in Whitman County in at least several years.
The scene was busy. A charter bus was set on its side, fire departments from all over Whitman County rushed to the crash just north of Pullman with sirens wailing and lights flashing.
Patients screamed as they came off the bus and looked for their friends and families -- some yelling from their stretchers -- others didn't move at all, posing as the dead.
Media members pestered fire captains in command, chomping at the bit for information. Ambulances transported fake victims to all three area hospitals. Even a Life Flight helicopter dropped in and transported some to the hospital.
The scenario: The driver of a charter bus on its way to Pullman had passed out at the wheel and rolled the bus on its side. Its windows were shattered and (fake) blood stains covered many of the seats. Six people on the bus were pronounced dead at the scene.
Bruce Haley, safety and security manager for Whitman Hospital and Medical Center in Colfax, said the drill was to ensure the hospitals could handle a surge of patients and coordinate with one another.
"We're making sure the process works," he said.
The McGregor Company lot on Whelan Road was the site of the mass casualty training. It was hosted by Whitman County Volunteer Fire District 12.
The Pullman Fire Department, and fire agencies from Colfax, Albion, Palouse and the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport assisted, as well as Whitman County Emergency Management, Whitcom emergency dispatch, the three area hospitals and the Whitman County Sheriff's Department.
While the full evaluation from the drill wasn't known Saturday, Mike Walker, a Fire District 12 captain, said, "It seems like it went off pretty well, without a hitch for the most part."
"We're going to have evaluations filled out from each department that participated and the hospitals and myself and all the other heads of the departments; we'll meet and we will discuss what we can do better, what we did well, what we can make better next time, and then the takeaways from it and what we need to concentrate on training wise to make ourselves be able to handle this as well as we possibly can."
Walker hit on a few of the issues he saw right off the bat.
"We had a lot of confusion with that many patients," he said. "We triage patients by severity. That's going to need some work."
He said working with the media was another sore spot.
"Our command with the media is probably going to need a little work, but you have a hectic situation . Typically we don't try to get the media arrested, but we will work on that," Walker said. "It's a learning curve for all of us."
At one point in the drill, a reporter was told he'd be arrested if he didn't leave the heart of the scene, after the reporter had been told multiple times to stand by and wait for information.
"We did a lot of things really well, and we saw some things we definitely need to improve on," he said.
Charlie Hayward was the last victim on the bus.
"I had head trauma with brain fluid leaking out of my ears, so I was dead," Hayward said. "They touched me a few times, and obviously I didn't move, and they helped everybody else out . They were really no nonsense, and they took it very seriously."
Walker said a crashed charter bus is a real emergency that could happen on the Palouse.
"Whenever we do major scenarios, or training in general, we always train to the worst case scenario," Walker said. "We make it worst case scenario, because if you're really good at worst case scenario, everything else that comes around is pretty cut and dried and easy for us to handle."
Josh Babcock can be reached at (208) 883-4630, or by email to jbabcock@dnews.com.
Copyright 2016 - Moscow-Pullman Daily News, Moscow, Idaho
