By Rob Rogers
The Marin Independent Journal
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — Zoe Morris isn’t used to playing the victim. As an emergency medical technician in training, the San Rafael resident spends most of her time learning how to rescue others.
On Saturday, however, Morris found herself covered in fake blood and lying beneath the wreckage of a crashed plane near the San Rafael Rock Quarry as part of a training exercise for the county’s rescue workers.
“I had to make it be as realistic as possible, to give the rescuers a chance to do what they would for someone who was injured in a similar way,” Morris said.
Members of the Marin County Urban Search and Rescue Team arrived at their annual training exercise Saturday morning knowing only that they were responding to a plane crash.
The 50 or so team members quickly discovered, however, that a mid-air collision had taken place, leaving two planes filled with victims - one lying several stories up on a rocky ledge within the quarry, and another in the shallow waters of the bay.
“The teams had to extricate eight to 10 victims from an area that had no access by land,” said Battalion Chief Mike Giannini of the Marin County Fire Department. “So the first thing they did was dispatch rescue boats from the Tiburon and Southern Marin fire departments. Once they discovered the location of the second plane, they had to hike up to the top of the quarry, set up their pickets, rappel down to the wreckage and tend to the victims.”
Throughout the day, members of the search and rescue team discovered surprise challenges connected to the mock crash - such as the presence of an unknown high-level government official on one of the planes, whose disappearance required the Marin team to work with state officials and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“One of our primary goals was to look at the way we interact with local, state and federal agencies,” Giannini said. “Any time you can have a face-to-face training activity with those other agencies, it’s extremely helpful. It’s much better than meeting them for the first time in a real-life emergency.”
In the last dozen years, the search and rescue team - which includes representatives from fire departments and departments of public works throughout the county - has challenged its members with dozens of different scenarios, from earthquakes and collapsed buildings to terrorist attacks. While the team has never had to respond to a major disaster in Marin, its skills were put to the test when members were called to the Gulf Coast in 2008 in the wakes of hurricanes Gustav and Ike.
“That gave us a lot of insight into some of the needs the county might have if we were faced with a similar disaster,” Giannini. “Some of the things we saw during that deployment could be easily replicated here in Marin in the face of a quake or another catastrophe.”
While the team typically holds its annual training exercise in the spring, it was delayed this year because of state budget issues, Giannini said.
“It’s unusual for us to be doing this in the middle of fire season,” Giannini said. “We’re just fortunate that there are no significant fires burning around the state.”
During the exercise, which began at 9 a.m. Saturday and continued late into the afternoon, Giannini and other fire officials monitored the way members of the team assessed the situation, made decisions, used their resources and took care of their “victims,” whose convincing shrieks welled up through the quarry’s granite walls.
“It’s hard for our planners to come up with scenarios that will tax the abilities of our members, because they’re so well versed in this,” Giannini said.
“Victim” Morris agreed.
“They were incredible rescuers. They did a really good job,” Morris said. “I’m glad I’m not really in a crash, but if I was, I’d want them to rescue me.”
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