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Permalink Reply by John Perry on June 12, 2009 at 7:15pm

If you have an Airport near you, they might be able to let you site in on one. I'm a former fire explorer,and currently a ff/emt-i. I also work part time as an airport firefighter. I have been a patient in 3 and firefighter in 4, emt in 1. it takes alot of prep. Planning is the most important. You might want to start small, just enought to tax your people first. Have outside observers watch and take notes. If you can find the movie about United flight 232, it might give you some ideas. If you cant find it, let me know, and I'll send you my copy, its on vhs. Keep safe and good luck. John

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Permalink Reply by Trevor Wendt on June 12, 2009 at 7:59pm

Thanks very much! i appreciate the offer. im going to have to rent that

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Permalink Reply by FETC on June 12, 2009 at 8:57pm

Our airport disaster drill was a good 6 months of pre-plannning, obtaining agency commitments, volunteer help, food, facilities and most importantly funding. Now that was with personnel working fulltime. Our last drill had 60 volunteer victims all moulaged and included over 100 agencies total.

We do it once every three years as it is seriously difficult to pull off.
Best of luck

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Permalink Reply by DUST on June 12, 2009 at 9:02pm

The movie is "A Thousand Heroes" we got a copy at work. It's good. You should keep it focused on 1 mission even though your incorporating a lot of agencies. In other words, don't make the scenario too complicated and make sure each agency knows where and what there job is and that on the day everyone gets to do something. Pay special attention to communications between agencies that is usually the weakest points in these "Mass Confusion" exercises.

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Permalink Reply by Shaun DeVore on August 14, 2009 at 1:13pm

I think it is a great idea, one can never be too prepared for such a situation. Im not sure how big of a department or city you are involved with, but there is alot of things you will need to prepare for. This is a very complex structure to make sure that all agencies involved are not only there to assist but to correctly do their job. That invovles ems doing triage and setting up treatment areas, this will take a large area for almost any department. However my suggestion to you if you would like to tone it down, do a mock school bus accident, this takes up alot less area and is not as difficult to put together. This way you can involve your agencies and practice with triage and other necessities without the complex size and structure of it. just a suggestion i hope the advice helps

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Permalink Reply by Ty M. Davison on August 12, 2010 at 1:49am

Jim,
I am very disapointed in your responce to this question!!! Obviously you are NOT a "firm believer in train like you fight and fight like you train", or you would not have posted, "You are getting ready to really bite off a lot more than you can chew, esepcially at your young age". Accomplishments do not come in CAN'T's, they come in CAN's!!!

Trevor,
I do belive you can do this drill and have GREAT success at it!!! Sounds like you have the hardest thing working in your favor. That being, volunteers able and willing to participate whenever you need them. I am the Training Officer for our Volunteer Fire Department, I am 30 years old and I am only allowed to have scheduled training once a month. This hardly gives us time to have real good long drills that last much more than 2-3 hours. When I took my EMT B class, we did a short simple drill for a MCI. I also seen it again durring one of our NIMS courses. It went kinda like this... We took about 30 Bottles or Binnie Babies and scadderd them all over the class room or FD Bay floor. On each one of these, there was a scenerio attached, ie: 45 y/o male with a BP of 148/99 and pulse of 98 Respirations at 16 with obiouse deformitties to his left leg and no pedal pulse. or a 24 y/o female that is having contractions and her water has broke with some vital signs. we also had some bottles that had situations that had some difficult dicisions to make, ie: 95 y/o male respirations <13 pulse of 55 pale cool and clammy and soforth. we then told the students that there has been a Train Wreck or plane crash or something like this and told them that the scene was safe but there are 30 bodies scattered about that needed attention. We expected the students to set up an IC, RED, YELLOW, GREEN and BLACK zones for Triage. And place all "Victoms" at there respected zones.
My suggestion is to do the same type of drill but expand and make your vitims "actual people" (scouts) not bottles and set up helicoper landing zones and ambulances and police and whoever else you you would like to include in this drill. You can make this drill as big or as small as you would like. You do not ALWAYS have to train like you fight, but some training is way better than having somebody tell you that this is way out of your league and not training at all!!! I can't belive he even posted that negative CRAP!!! Because of people like him, department training ends up being a bunch of rednecks sitting on the tailboard of firetrucks drinking beer and then not being able to work together when the call comes in. I applaud your will and desire to work with the young people (junior firefighters and scouts both)!!! I wish I had more time to do the same. We also have a Cadet Program for Junior and Seinor High School students. I am only able to join their weekly training about every other or every two weeks. It is such a great program to watch them grow and suceed. It is always in the back of my head that maybe some day down the road, one of these kids might be the ones that are pulling my old butt out of a fire or giving me the breaths that save my life. It is so cool! Brovo Zulu!!! I would be happy to ever swap any training ideas with you.

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Permalink Reply by John Crabbe on August 12, 2010 at 2:02am

Hopefully he is still looking for info after a year.

:-)

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Permalink Reply by Mike Schlags (Captain Busy) Retd on August 12, 2010 at 2:35am

Hey Trevor, I firmly support your endeavors toward putting together a mass casualty, S&R, or whatever drill. Training is training and having spent several years in scouting including time as a Scoutmaster, I assure you, your goals are only as big as your dreams...

Here's what I would put together to help you get a start...

Everyone involved needs to understand the concept of ICS. Learn it and use it... It's what we use. Using ICS, delegate responsibilities based on functional groups. ICS is used because it grows with the incident. There is no way you can pull off something this involved without help. Learn how to delegate buddy.

Your incident(s) can be as large or small as you want. At first, start out with a simple (5) five victim vehicle accident. Include black, green, yellow and red tags, using START Simple Triage.

If possible, make contact with your local EMSA / Disaster Services / OES, whoever holds the keys to the massive amount of triage tags on hand, carried by LEO's, fire engines and ambulances... supposedly... Not familiar with the tags? Here's what they look like:

Putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, and through repetitive training, you will eventually figure out how to make things flow smoothly, learning a lot in the process. And believe it or not, MCI events do happen...

And yes, the below two photographs show a head on collision between a tour bus and a fire engine... anything can happen out there...

I have attached (2) two powerpoint presentations. Between reviewing the two programs and printing out the PDF file, you should be able to hybridize something useful for your project. Anyone else out there thinking about tackling a MCI drill should also take the time to download the two attached files. The homework has been done for you, all you have to do is rip it off and change the names to reflect your agency. I am a giver...

In the interest of life, fire and environmental safety!

CBz

Attachments:

• mci_plan.ppt, 707 KB
• MCI Overview.ppt, 101 KB
• TagBasics4Dwnld.pdf, 925 KB

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Permalink Reply by Trainer on August 12, 2010 at 7:07am

Mike, from what I see think you need Finance and logistics in the mix also, if your going over 12hr opps period better have planning...:)

I love these large scale multi-agency multi-jurisdictional drills, did one in 08, 20 departments hazmat, TRT, police, public works, health dept, city government, 2 hospitals and over 200 participants, 2 years in the planing. FEMA has the bible for this, 300 page download.
Now as I say all of this I am preparing for the next one in 11 or 12, will be even bigger with a 36hr deployment. My advice on this....not a 1 man show, every agency needs to be represented in the planning but if you go to the FEMA book it spells it out clearly.

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Permalink Reply by David White on August 13, 2010 at 12:13am

Three steps:
1- Classroom/didactic training - MCI ICS, objectives for each position,etc..
2 - Table top - low stress exercise & application of principles learned in the classroom
3 - Full scale drill

Have fun..

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Permalink Reply by Steve Howard on January 28, 2011 at 8:45pm

Good advice to try and get in contact with the closest airport that serves commercial passenger airlines. They are required to conduct tabletop exercises every year and a full scale exercise every three years as part of their certification. Most have a number of planning meetings leading up to the exercise.

Free training on setting emergency exercises is available through FEMA at EMI's online training site. The IS 120.a, 130 and 139 courses are all independent study online courses.

Another good web resource is the HSEEP web site. Tons of info there (almost too much!) Volume IV has lots of examples of exercise documents to look at for ideas. If you have a supervisor to approve your application, you should try to get a login to the HSEEP toolkit. Even more resources are available in that site but is does require a need to know approval.

I teach exercise design and planning and the most common mistake I see is folks jumping right to full scale exercises without going the preliminary steps of drill, tabletops, etc. Nothing like giving a test without any training. No wonder so many full scale exercises end up being a frustrating experience. Some folks say running a fully scripted and practiced scenario is cheating. I say if they can't do that without making mistakes, how can you ever expect them to do it without practice. They just reinforce bad decisions. Sorry, I'll get off my soap box now.

Good luck. Good exercise planning is something that seems to fall pretty low on the priorities of emergency preparation. I can steer you to other resources if your interest goes that way.

Oops, I just realized this is an old post. Maybe the info will help someone else.

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