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Preparing for disaster
Emergency services personnel participate in mass-casualty drill Saturday
By MELODY ASPER
For The Evening Sun
Posted: 08/30/2009 01:00:00 AM EDT
If there were any theatrical agents in the Cross Keys area on Saturday morning, they would have found more then a few potential stars getting into their roles as part of a mass-casualty drill conducted at CrossKeysVillage - The Brethren Home Community.
"I want my mother. Where is my mother?" cried one 80-year-old "victim" identified only as Dorothy as a fireman helped her out of the building.
With a wry smile, Dorothy said her "injures," written on a plastic-coated card attached to her arm, were a bleeding head injury and severe disorientation. After identifying her injuries for the press, Dorothy went back into her role as a bewildered victim.
"Can you please find my mother?" she cried in a shrill, girlish voice. "She's got to be looking for me."
The scenario Dorothy and a cast of about 150 other volunteers played out Saturday was that a tornado had hit the Brethren Home Community outside New Oxford at 9 that morning. The volunteers included Brethren Home assisted-living and cottage residents, family members of emergency workers and others.
Every fire company in AdamsCounty and six from YorkCounty were on the scene, said Joe Swartz, public information officer for United Hook and Ladder No. 33.
Pretend casualties were littered throughout the 250-acre complex, which has a real resident population of more than 900 people and a workforce of 600, said Frank Buhrman, Brethren Home communications director.
Brethren Home representatives and emergency-services personnel worked on plans for the "mass casualty" drill for six to eight months, Buhrman said. Saturday's scenario was the first large-scale drill ever to be done at the Brethren Home or in the immediate area.
While area fire companies knew there was going to be some type of drill Saturday, no one responding was notified beforehand of the scenario, location or extent of catastrophe involved.
The initial 911 call was sent in to AdamsCounty for a pulled fire alarm at 9 a.m., Buhrman said,
and the response from area emergency services came quickly.
United Hook and Ladder Fire Chief Steve Rabine was on the scene about five minutes later.
The first United Hook and Ladder fire truck arrived within about seven minutes, said EMS Medic 46 outreach coordinator Bruce Yealy, with more equipment from other companies arriving in about 12 minutes.
Fifteen fire engines, three rescue vehicles, nine ambulances, two boats, two ladder trucks, a scuba team and two medic units responded to the drill, Swartz said. The boats and scuba team were brought in for a scenario that the tornado had caused a boat to capsize on the campus' pond, leaving two occupants missing and presumed underwater.
Many of the actual assisted-living residents were apprehensive about participating in the exercise, said residential services manager Annette Wilt, so the residents who did not want to participate were taken to a safe and secure area away from the commotion.
As more of the supposed patients were brought out of the facility during the drill, EMS personnel quickly worked to evaluate, or triage, the injuries so the worst "injured" would go to the hospital first.
Within minutes, EMS member Juan Cortez of United Hook and Ladder was working to keep ambulatory "patients" together and talking to him as he waited for ambulances to pick them up.
"I am monitoring them at all times," Cortez said. "I constantly keep communicating with the patients until we can get them away from the scene and to the hospital."
Other areas of the Brethren Home campus also were involved in the drill. The disaster scenario included a resident "trapped" in an elevator at the Harmony Ridge apartment complex, a cottage with its roof ripped off and the occupants buried under debris, and a number of "disoriented" individuals wandering throughout the complex and in the nearby woods.
Another issue to be dealt with immediately was an "unknown cloud" of vapor on the property's southern boundary. That scenario later would be identified as a toxic spill from an overturned truck as a result of the tornado, Buhrman said. As each of the incidents was discovered, he said, specific groups of emergency workers were sent to each scene to remedy the situation.
"Our campus presents the perfect kind of scenario that they (the emergency responders) wanted to train on," Buhrman said. "These guys have done really great on everything that they do and it was felt that now its time to push them further and see what they else can do."
Throughout the exercise the "victims" made sure that emergency responders got a full workout, as many stayed in character throughout the ordeal.
Andy Grimm, a volunteer at the facility, portrayed a victim "with a lot of anxiety." Grimm was one of about 40 "patients" led down the stairwell from the fourth floor.
"You should have heard it in the stairwell," he said. "There was so much screaming and crying, and it sounded real - I couldn't tell if it was actually real or not."
Brady Goulden, a 15-year-old whose mother works at GettysburgHospital, volunteered as an "elderly victim." He was amazed at how real the situation seemed.
"There was a lot of screaming, and there were smoke effects that really seemed real, but we all could breathe OK," he said. "It sure was realistic."
June Livingston, who said she was celebrating her 78th birthday Saturday, smiled as she said that the drill was not only exciting and fun but also important. The card listing her "injury" described her as having a hurt leg, but she said she actually does have a "bad leg" and uses a cane.
"I can get around OK, but there are a lot of people here who can't help themselves," Livingston said. "This is a great way to find out how they can be helped when they need it."
Many of the emergency responders echoed Livingston's sentiments.
"This is a very good exercise to evaluate the emergency-service aspects of the entire area," Schwartz said. "The drill encompasses not only the Brethren Home but (also) local, county and even state cooperation."
While firefighters and emergency responders had the "tornado" site under their control within just a few hours, about 50 fake victims were to be taken to the emergency rooms at Hanover and Gettysburg hospitals, Yealy said.
"That's way more then ... either of the emergency rooms can handle at a time," he said. "But that is what this is supposed to do -- test all of our limits."
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