'In case of emergency'

By MEGAN HUGHES

[email protected]

Ironwood - The Gogebic-Iron County Airport hosted its triennial crash simulation on Saturday morning.

With more than 19 organizations participating, the event drew a crowd to the airfield as organizers and volunteers worked together to get safety personnel practice in the event of an accident.

The simulation kicked off in the morning as volunteers boarded the "airplane," a bus from the Ironwood Area School District that had been parked at the end of the runway. Each volunteer wore a piece of paper explaining the character, or "patient," they were to play for the simulation.

"They got to pick their own symptoms," said Heidi DeRosso, of the Emergency Management Office for Gogebic County.

According to DeRosso, planning for the exercise took more than a year, and that at the end of the exercise, Emergency Management officials will submit a report to the state on how it went. 

Two of the patients told The Globe about the characters they were playing.

Jenna Saari was playing a 63-year-old patient with an arm deformity, and Micaela Kjellman was playing a 17-year-old patient who is panicking about losing her cell phone. 

The duo are first-year nursing students at Gogebic Community College, where they learned about the drill. 

"Our instructor gave a sign-up sheet to us," said Kjellman. 

"This was the highest number of volunteers we have ever had," said DeRosso, adding this is the biggest one they have had due to new airline and aiport requirements.

Organizers informed The Globe that in a true emergency, the media would not be allowed on the airfield, however, for this exercise they allowed a reporter access to the scene. The Globe was escorted out to the location of the drill by 1st Lt. Chris Gerard, commander of the Michigan State Police Wakefield Post.

"In a real event, obviously you wouldn't be in here," said DeRosso. "I talked to Gerard, and went 'well, for this, go on and bring them up.'" 

The drill lasted about two hours, as members of local fire departments extracted the volunteer patients from the "airplane" to be checked over by members of the medical personnel.

Patients were labeled with tags indicating the level of "trauma."

Some of the patients were labeled in critical need of care, and were the earliest to be taken off the field by the ambulance crews, while the lower priority patients were set in an area of the field near the "plane" following their extraction.

One patient character, who was assigned "confusion" as her malady, wandered into the nearby field and had to be returned by members of the local fire department.

Besides the volunteer patients filling their roles of living individuals, there were also cones scattered around designating deceased individuals.

Following the drill, the patients who remained on the field loaded up into the bus to be driven off the field, as fire departments, medical personnel, law enforcement and other groups made their way off the field.

Participants gathered at the nearby pavilion for a debriefing and for lunch.

Zach Brentar, Emergency Management assistant coordinator, debriefed all in attendance, speaking about what could be improved upon for the future.

"Overall, things have gone really well," said Brentar. "I appreciate everybody. You all made it really easy and it ran really well."

One of the suggested improvements was improving communication between agencies from Wisconsin and those in Michigan. 

"Wisconsin and Michigan can't really talk to each other. That is critical, and we knew that coming into it. That is something we need to work on," said Brentar. "We need to be able to communicate with both states and all agencies."

Brentar said that the two states use different channels for their systems, which is part of the difficulty.

He also pointed out that one of the volunteers had been black tagged (most critical), when she was not needed to be. He said it was likely due to over assessment of the injuries.

Mike Kocher, the Ontonagon County 911 Emergency Management Director, congratulated everybody for a successful drill.

"Obviously, this is not something we actually want to plan for, but doing it when the weather is nice is important. We followed the rate of communication across the borders, and it went really, really smoothly," he said. 

Kocher was one of the evaluators for the event. He said that one of the questions that had been asked was what would be done if a crash occurred during the winter, when it was cold and there was snow on the ground, given that there would be a number of patients out in the snow.

He said one work around for this was to organize an arrangement with local transportation services to borrow one of their buses in the event of an emergency, so that patients could be moved inside to be kept warm. He explained that it is a similar arrangement that airports in Ontonagon County have.

"One thing that I did notice was that I did not know where all the staging areas were for the victims," said Annette Sawadogo, the WUPHD Emergency Preparedness Coordinator. "It wasn't clear where people were supposed to be." She recommended for the future that there be a coordinator in charge of making sure people were aware of where they needed to be, and overseeing these staging areas.

Cheif Medical Examiner and Investigator Steven Hiiter of the Michigan Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine said, "It was a good insight on how everybody works together, so we appreciate that."

Interim Airport Manager Todd Richter thanked all of the organizations for participating in the drill.

"It's a big event for the airport, we do it every three years," he said, "There is obviously some things we need to work on communication-wise. There always is when we come out of these drills. That's why we do them, so that we get familiar with who the other people are and how we can make this run smoother if this ever is an actual emergency. We are extremely happy with the cooperation this year from everybody involved."

Other organizations spoke about their individual experiences at the drill, and had a Q&A session with volunteers who were curious about how their character's symptoms would have been treated in the field if this had been a real emergency.

"The biggest thing for us is thanking everyone. This is the biggest one we have had to date," said DeRosso. "We had 24 patient tags, and every one was filled."