Emergency drill gives city staff, first responsders key experience
Vandalia city first responders and administrative staff were recently faced with a crisis involving a crashed school bus and a truck spilling hazardous materials. The events were a drill tied to the city’s Emergency Operations Plan, designed to give staff experience working in an operations center while managing a largescale crisis.
Organizers strived for realism. The scenario involved a school bus struck from behind by a truck carrying hazardous chemicals. The crash was staged in the parking lot of the Vandalia Sports Complex. The rear of the truck had a device to generate thick smoke so responders could get a feel for operating in a dangerous environment. There were also actors brought in to play the role of the victims.
“We had 11 kids from the Vandalia Youth Theater, plus some of the children of firefighters on staff and four of our Fire Explorers who participated as victims of the crash,” said Vandalia Fire Chief Chad Follick. “We used makeup to give some of the victims wounds to present to the responders, who then had to treat those injuries appropriately.”
While first responders worked the mock crash site, city administrative staff worked the operations center.
“The emergency operations center is designed to support an incident like this,” Follick said. “When you have a larger scale incident like this, we want to take the burden off the guys at the street level and do some of that planning and logistics inside the EOC command center.”
Follick said the EOC facilitates multiple-agency coordination where staff can balance and obtain resources.
“We can also control what’s happening in the city outside of that emergency,” Follick said. “Because even when we’re dealing with this emergency, there’s still 9-1-1 calls coming in for standard medical emergencies and police calls and things like that. So we can take a little bit of a burden off of our dispatch center by handling some of those calls inside the EOC.”
Another key component of the EOC is to create consistent messaging so that the media and the public get a clear and accurate picture of what’s happening.
Vandalia received assistance from other jurisdictions to complete the training exercise.
“We brought in five ambulances from outside the city along with additional fire resources from outside the city,” Follick said. “We also brought in controllers and evaluators, people to help us deliver the exercise and then evaluate the exercise from outside the organization.”
Follick said it is important to get honest feedback from outside observers.
“We want to get fresh eyes on what we’re doing to make sure we’re doing the things we should be doing correctly,” he said. “If there are things that need to be tweaked, we want that information to come to us.”
Follick said all of the participants complete an evaluation. The results are compiled and included in a written report that identifies what went well and what could be improved upon.
One new wrinkle to the emergency operations drill was the use of drone aircraft to relay real-time video of the crash scene. The feed was displayed on a large screen located at the front of the operations center, and participants had the option of scanning a QR code to watch the video on their personal devices.
The live action drills are performed every three years.
“I would say that our Division of Fire has been very aggressive in planning for emergencies, and it’s paid off for us,” said Chief Follick. “Like most departments, we experience turnover, so it’s important to get the new people up to speed.”
Follick said it’s also important for the residents of Vandalia to see crews training and preparing for emergencies.
“We don’t want them to happen, but we are realists,” Follick explained. “We have planes, trains and automobiles here in town, so we have the potential for any kind of major disaster.”