N.J. mall drill helps personnel know what to do
By BARBARA WILLIAMS
Herald News (Passaic County, NJ)
Copyright 2006 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
All Rights Reserved
For nearly two hours, Joyce Lima laid on the hard beige floor tiles outside the food court. Haki Krasniqi tried to get past a security officer and ended up in handcuffs, and Jerry Frederick landed in a puddle after collapsing in the parking lot.
It was a rough morning at Willowbrook Mall in Wayne on Sunday, and the stores weren’t even open yet.
Fortunately, these three were just volunteers playing a part for an emergency preparedness drill, and not really sick, arrested or dead, respectively. They, and the more than 200 emergency personnel involved in the three-hour exercise, were able to return to their families Sunday afternoon.
“I was told I was going to get a little dirty, but I didn’t realize there was a puddle,” said Wayne resident Frederick, lying in wet clothes on a stretcher after being pronounced dead. “But I don’t mind. It’s for a good cause.”
The drill, which was run by the Wayne Office of Emergency Management and a slew of other organizations including the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Rapid Deployment Team and the mall’s management office, was designed to test the response of local police, fire and first-aid responders. It did that, and then some.
The scenario
What was thought to be a biological agent was released in the center of the shopping mall when a security officer opened a child’s abandoned backback. It demonstrated precisely “just how much needs to get done at the beginning,” said Wayne police Sgt. Mark McGrath, who wrote the script for the drill.
The plan
Determine what the agent was, get the sick medical treatment and out of the mall as quickly as possible, prevent other shoppers and merchants from being exposed, and keep those who were exposed all together until they could be decontaminated in a shower tent outside.
The reality
Victims waited for long periods before receiving medical attention, and hazmat workers took more than an hour to suit up and get into the mall, partly because some equipment was not working properly. Authorities also realized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shoppers could flee from the area before anyone could determine if they had been infected.
“If something like this were to happen, you want your first-responders in there in five minutes, but that’s just not possible,” said Sandy Galacio, Wayne Office of Emergency Management coordinator. “You have to do preliminary evaluations. You don’t want your emergency people going down. Then who helps them?”
The delay surprised mall executives. Nancy Barbary, mall general manager, said she is used to a response time of under 15 minutes from Wayne officials for various emergencies.
“During the holidays, we have Wayne police officers working in a substation here, so the response time is even shorter,” Barbary said. “Now we’ll have to see how we can best deal with a much longer response time.”
What worked well
Communication among emergency personnel; the command center was well-informed and able to make timely and appropriate decisions; and duties were delegated so no one agency was overwhelmed.
“This is a chance to find out what we can do better, what can be improved,” Galacio said. “We know that if the mall was full of people, the timeline would have been longer, but we need to look at what we can do to shorten it in other areas.”
Leaders of the respective agencies will critique their own work and then sit down over the next several days and look at the overall drill.
But they are the first to acknowledge that should an emergency develop in this mall that sees up to 45,000 a day during busy shopping times, it would be a formidable task to decontaminate all those people. There will also be a lot of people reacting the way Krasniqi’s character did.
Krasniqi played the role of a frantic dad looking for his two daughters who had been separated from him once the emergency began. He continued to fight with security guards until they physically restrained him and placed him in handcuffs. The father of four said it was easy to play the part.
“If it was really my 4-year-old daughter who I couldn’t get to, this guy (security officer) will either be in danger from me or he’ll help me find her,” said Krasniqi, of Clifton.
Lima, calm and pleasant considering she spent the morning on the mall floor, only said to the hazmat workers quietly, “It took you a while to get here.”
The Wayne woman later found out her pretend-condition had nothing to do with the white powder — results showed it was negative. So it also appeared that Frederick’s fake death was due to an apparent heart attack.
What to do
Authorities cannot give standard rules for mall emergencies because different situations require different responses, but a few tips for all emergencies:
- Be calm. Don’t panic.
- Stay quiet, so you can hear the mall’s public-address system.
- Listen to directions. Find separated loved ones later.
Fast facts
Agencies that participated in the emergency preparedness drill:
- Willowbrook Mall management
- Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office’s Rapid Response Team
- Passaic County Sheriff’s Department’s hazmat team
- Wayne hazmat team
- Clifton hazmat team
- Wayne Emergency Management
- Wayne Police Department
- Wayne Fire Department
- Wayne First Aid Squad
- American Red Cross