Disaster drill sharpens skills

Hot Springs County Emergency Management, with cooperation from several agencies, conducted a disaster drill last Saturday in front of the Chamber of Commerce.

The drill, which started shortly after 9 a.m., was the reconstruction of a wreck that included a semi-truck carrying guthion, a nerve agent used in pesticides with similar properties to the deadly serin compound.

Volunteer actors, including nine students from the high school drama club and four adults, portrayed victims in several different situations, from having been in the wreck to being exposed to the guthion powder.

"The stars were our volunteers," Emergency Management Coordinator Bill Gordon said. "They were spectacular. Everyone was given roles, had symptoms to present and they played them perfectly. They went above and beyond what we gave them."

Various scenarios were used including a walk-in at the hospital, someone brought to the hospital on a backboard, a life flight and even a walk in at the nursing home so they could practice their procedures.

The drill was evaluated by Emergency Response Region 6, and Gordon said they had big praise for how things were handled, giving exceptional praise to fire chief Mark Collins for his handling of the area as incident commander.

There were seven EMTs on scene along with five people from mental health, nine firefighters, public health, the Chamber of Commerce, State Park employees, the school district, sheriff's office, police department and emergency management.

Classic Air Medical from Lander brought in a helicopter and transported a "patient", all for free.

"This was good training for them, too," Gordon said. "It helped give them some insight into what the area is like which could save time in a real emergency."

Dr. Vernon Miller was the physician in charge at the hospital and declared, because of the way patients were handled immediately, that everyone in the scenario would have survived had this been an actual incident.

Gordon was very happy with how things went.

"Of course, we had some small, tactical errors," he said, "but they were common, easy mistakes to correct. We know we have some work to do on our line of communications, our incident command structure and hazmat awareness.

"Everything went extremely well and the support from our responders was wonderful. We found our strengths and things totally worked out with the exercise. We wanted the whole community involved and we certainly got that.

"I'm so proud of everyone, the work that was done. Its always good to find mistakes and fix them now. That is the goal."

The group had a two hour debriefing at the firehall after the drill and Gordon said everyone was given the opportunity to not only talk about how things went, but to make any suggestions on how to do things better.

The drill ended at about 10:45 a.m. on Saturday and Gordon said, if it had been a real incident, things would have been cleaned up and the street reopened by Sunday morning.

"Everybody learned. Everybody demonstrated skills. You can't ask for more than that," he said.