27 June 2006

EMS Drills Simulate Real-Life Response

HANCEVILLE, AL-- A 747 jet airliner crashes into the James C. Bailey Building. The campus has been evacuated, but 350 passengers and crew members need to be rescued from the wreckage.

   Responding agencies have come from all over Cullman and surrounding counties. An incident command center is set up in the grocery store parking lot across the street from the scene. Hanceville High School serves as the triage center. Hanceville Funeral Home is the morgue.

   Although they hope they never see it happen, the eight students in the Wallace State Community College EMS program have the knowledge and know-how to respond to such a disaster, thanks to their table-top disaster drills.

   The Wallace State scenario was devised by the women’s team of Andrea Altman, Andrea Gibson, Angela Pigg and Katherine Kirk.

   The men’s team of Wayne Duckett, David Curnel, Brent Rhodes and Philip Pendergrass chose to demonstrate a collapsed bridge. The group showed where triage, incident command and a landing zone would need to be located in order to work most efficiently.

   The drills were the practical application of the course’s Operations class.

   “This is the way it’s really done,” program director Cindy Dorn said. “Agencies write out a plan on paper, work it out in scale, tweak it and then put it in full-scale mode. Then they go back and talk about what worked and what didn’t work.”

   The groups spent four weeks coming up with a disaster, researching responding agencies and their capabilities, figuring out how the physical landscape could help or hinder and putting together a table-top scale of the disaster.

   The men’s team won the friendly competition and will retain bragging rights throughout their remaining two semesters in the program.

   Diagnostic Imaging program director Terrie Gammon asked the students how responding agencies from different areas would know who the incident commander is.

   “That’s what the drills are for,” Pendergrass said.

   Usually, the incident commander is the local fire chief or head of the emergency management agency, Dorn said. “Those people usually have a broader spectrum of training and are familiar with the surroundings.”

   Campus security guard Ron Stallings said the presentations were very interesting.

   “I learned a lot,” he said.

   Everything the Emergency Medical Services program does has a purpose, Dorn said.

   “Our goal in EMS is to preserve life,” she said. “And one way to do that is through pre-planning.”

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  Terri Brunck
  Communications and Marketing
  Wallace State Community College
  P.O. Box 2000
  Hanceville, AL 35077
  256/352-8033
  E-mail: Terri.Brunck@WallaceState.edu