By Daphne Duret
The Palm Beach Post (Florida)
MARTIN COUNTY, Fla. — The woman clutched Pamela Black’s arm and took several steps toward the makeshift intake center at the Martin County fairgrounds before she doubled over in pain, grabbing her right calf.
“I can’t! I can’t go any farther!” she yelled.
Her cries were slightly less fake than the gash painted on her leg, covered with faux blood. But to Black — one of dozens of local residents who have volunteered as rescue workers in the event a disaster — the woman’s injuries might as well have been real.
“It’s OK,” she told the woman, leading her to a chair and encouraging her to take deep breaths. “I know it’s scary, but there’s a bunch of us here and we’ll take care of you.”
Martin County firefighters and health department officials set up the exercise Thursday as a training opportunity to help rescue workers learn how to respond in case a major disaster — such as a hurricane or terrorist attack — causes mass injuries and forces them to treat the injured in a setting other than a hospital.
For Thursday’s scenario, more than 100 volunteers posed as people who took shelter at Bessey Creek Elementary school during an imaginary hurricane and were “injured” when the building collapsed.
People with serious injuries would be taken to a hospital, said Martin County Fire Rescue Deputy Chief Joe Ferrara, but those with minor injuries would be shipped to an Alternative Medical Treatment Site such as the fairgrounds.
Ferrara said the fairgrounds is one of seven such sites in the county, though rescue workers are trained to set up in a field if necessary.
Jackson Sewell, a 12-year-old Boy Scout headed to seventh grade at Hidden Oaks Middle, played the role of a child whose eye was bloody and swollen shut.
“I told them some flying object hit it,” he said. “It wasn’t bad as I thought, but I don’t think I would have been as calm if it was real.”
Back inside the “intake area,” Black was sitting with another woman, holding her hand as she waited to be treated.
Black, a licensed clinical social worker with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, said the exercise helped reinforce her belief that in traumatic situations, emotional trauma is just as real as physical pain.
The emergency workers were not without mistakes — they asked a woman to sit down without noticing that a tag detailing her injuries revealed that she had third-degree burns all over her back and legs.
Martin County Health Department Administrator Mark Chittum said these are things that the volunteers and rescue workers will learn from so that should a real disaster strike, mistakes like that won’t happen.
“Theoretically in any case like this where you have hundreds of people coming in with minor injuries, there will be one or two cases where the injuries worsen to the point where they will need to be hospitalized right away, and we need to do our best to identify those cases as quickly as possible,” Chittum said.
On Thursday, the goal for the rescue workers was to cycle about 50 patients per hour through registration, triage, treatment and release every hour.
Fire-rescue teams in Orange and Leon counties are planning similar events, but organizers of Thursday’s event believe it was the first of its kind in the state.
For volunteers such as 65-year-old Stuart resident Chuck Pierce, who posed as one of the injured, the exercise reassured him that if he were ever a real victim of a disaster here, he would be in good hands.
“The way you react in a crisis situation is a reflection of how you’re trained,” he said. “And all the departments here seem to have things lined up.”
Copyright 2008, The Palm Beach Post (Florida)