ALLENDALE, Mich. — After a year of planning, the timing of Ottawa County's Mass Casualty Incident drill made it's importance even more clear. EMS, fire and law enforcement crews practiced how to respond in the event a car ran through a crowd, just one day after that exact scenario happened in Pennsylvania.
The MCI drill was hosted at Grand Valley State University near the football stadium. The idea was to fabricate a football game atmosphere in which something went horribly wrong and a substantial amount of people were injured.
Rich Szczepanek, EMS Systems Administrator with Ottawa County's medical control board says their responders are skilled and well trained for the situations they face day to day, but a scenario where dozens have been injured or killed is something most have not come across in the field.
"You never want it to happen, but you have to be ready for it," Szczepanek said. "We can handle even three four and five six even more patients, but when we get down to this point where we have a significant number of patients it’s a whole different ballgame, we don’t get this experience that often so we have to train to get better at it."
60 actors played different roles from dead bodies to injured bystanders to people frantically trying to get help. As the drill played out, crews maintained a sense of calm urgency, but none were sprinting or showing a look of being overwhelmed. Szczepanek says this is crucial for controlling the situation, and that much of what he saw demonstrated the effectiveness of the county's plan.
Two sessions of the drill took place Sunday with different responders experiencing the situation each time. Actors had a lanyard with their symptoms rather than using expensive makeup to demonstrate their injuries. As crews arrived on scene the first thing done was assigning colored wristbands to each bystander - green, yellow, and red for escalating severity, black to represent a person who died on the scene. Those wristbands served as signals for crews arriving later to respond accordingly.
"There are probably 400 firefighters in Ottawa county, we’re going to have a handful here," Szczepanek said. "It’s very likely that as we move forward this could almost be an annual exercise."
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