A simulated aircraft accident tested the emergency plans, rescue procedures, and communication of first responders Wednesday morning. The full-scale exercise included 54 volunteers whose “injuries” ranged from minor to critical. Officials will meet with the evaluators today to learn where the strengths and weaknesses were during the exercise.
All manner of first response personnel was involved — from city and county fire and police, to hospital and EMS services, to the coroner’s office and the reunification center.
Daviess County Fire Chief Jeremy Smith said they do a full-scale exercise every 3 years.
“This hopefully will show us our strengths, but will show us weaknesses as well,” he said before the simulated event. “Hopefully we’ll use this to learn and continue to improve and provide the best care we can to the citizens of Daviess County.
After the exercise, Smith couldn’t say definitively what areas needed to be worked on because officials aren’t meeting with the evaluators until Thursday morning.
“Anytime you have something of that scale you always have a few hiccups, but for the most part things went really smoothly,” he said. “I don’t know what the evaluators’ views are yet, so I won’t have a lot more information till I sit down there and figure out how we were critiqued on it. We did get a lot of positive feedback today, but we don’t have the entire critique yet. We’ll read their viewpoints and see what they saw that we need to work on to correct as we move forward.”
Three years ago, one of the bigger critiques was breakdowns in communication between the various first response agencies. Smith said they are right there “on the cusp of having that solved” thanks to the $6 million radio system the County first responders are switching over to (and the same one used by the City).
The radio system will be fully installed in the next few months, and it was tested some on Wednesday.
“The new radios, we were actually able to use them today in a limited capacity and those worked great,” Smith said. “That helped out a lot. We had zero transmission problems, which is a first for any of the exercises. That’s pretty exciting there knowing that we’re getting ready to go live with this system.”
A total of 54 volunteers played the role of injured parties. Smith said three were pronounced deceased on scene, two were flown by helicopter to the hospital, and the rest were transported by ground to the hospital.
While plane crashes are rare, Smith said there are other instances that could arise where several dozen people are injured at one time — so the actions taken during the exercise can translate to other types of responses.
“What it does help you with in those situations is triage,” he said. “Being able to identify the ones that need to be transported first, second, third and so forth, those things do transfer out to other calls in which we respond to.”
Still, plane crashes do happen — such as when one person was injured in a small plane accident this May. Smith said the response to that scene went well, and it shows that these exercises pay off.
“I was very pleased with the way things went (in our response to that accident),” Smith said. “The guys did it like clockwork, just like we practice in these drills. I encouraged my personnel this morning to treat this like it’s real. If you start playing like it’s a drill, you tend to get complacent. So if you treat it like you would on an actual scene, that is what you will be trained to do each and every time. So it showed that this training works, by the way that incident was handled.”
