The Daily Camera
LONGMONT, Colo. — A “mass casualty incident drill” surprised students training as emergency medical technicians Saturday afternoon, interrupting their normal class at the Longmont Front Range Community College to practice emergency response techniques in a simulated disaster.
Wearing red corn syrup to simulate fake wounds, volunteers lay in cars and on the pavement of a campus parking lot to imitate a multiple-car pileup on Interstate 25. The scenario also included a toxic gas suicide in one of the cars, a busload of injured elementary school students and a woman on the verge of giving birth — to twins.
“More than anything, what they are going to get out of this is how chaotic things can get,” said class instructor Troy Bohm.
Students were assigned roles in the classroom and then released onto the scene to practice their triage protocol, assigning victims a color based on the severity of their injuries, and attending to them accordingly, and basic training techniques like measuring vital signs, CPR, removing victims from cars and placing victims on backboards.
“They start kind of shell-shocked,” said instructor Richard Estep, chief organizer of the drill and a trained emergency professional.
Estep said he started the semi-annual mass casualty drill two years ago after reading an article that said most fighter pilots in Vietnam died within their first three missions, but that those trained in simulated combat fared much better.
“We make mistakes here so hopefully we don’t when the big one comes,” Estep said.
Volunteers from emergency response agencies around Boulder County brought ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles to the scene, assisting the students with the drill while testing their own communication systems.
Hazmat response
A hazardous material response team practiced securing the simulated gas-enclosed car, and nursing students attended to “victims,” brought in on backboards by EMT students, in the two makeshift emergency rooms.
“This is the first time I was put on a backboard and transported,” said volunteer victim Alex Hall, 22. “It was terrifying.”
The victims, including former students of the EMT class and a group of children, were assigned a level of injury and fake vital signs before the drill began.
Eva Klauber, 10, chose to be one of the “dead” victims, with a severe brain injury that included grotesque makeup.
“It was really boring, I just laid on the hard concrete the entire time,” said Klauber, who said she had participated in a previous drill and returned because she liked it.
Radio difficulties forced participants to improvise communication for the wide range of emergency response personnel, but Estep noted that those kinds of problems are not uncommon in the real world.
“It’s always this level of chaos,” Estep said. “There’s always something you didn’t plan for.”
The training drill ended with a group meeting to discuss what went wrong, what went well and what could be improved.
“I’m glad to see nobody opened the hazmat death vehicle, but it was quite a while before hazmat was requested,” said Rural Fire Division chief Jeff Webb, one of the coordinators of the event.
Webb and other volunteering professionals also stressed the need for awareness of the whole scene, the ability to multitask in the field, and to better appropriate resources and time to the more seriously injured, but that they otherwise performed well.
EMT student Michael Head, 19, said he learned to quickly identify and care for the injured in the drill, and that the experience was intense.
“I had to triage the school bus,” Head said. “It was pretty hectic -- chaotic and stressful.”
The students will take a test at the end of the semester, and have to pass a national test to become certified basic EMTs.
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