Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport (KBRO), Brownsville, Texas: Mock plane crash helps emergency teams prepare

Officials prepared for the worst Wednesday morning during a practice conducted at the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport.

More than 100 students from the Brownsville Independent School District arrived at the Commemorative Air Force hangar and were loaded up with make-up, making some appear to have incapacitating injuries.

Inside the hangar, officials from the airport, fire and police departments and other agencies checked radios, went over checklists and made last minute preparations for a simulated plane crash.

Brownsville Assistant City Manager and Emergency Management Coordinator Jeff Johnston said the Federal Aviation Administration requires passenger airports to conduct the exercise every three years.

“We are testing the airport’s response plan for aircraft disaster or aircraft emergencies,” Johnston said. “The bottom line is to get everybody together to practice and make sure communication lines are clear.”

Far from the eyes of media, who weren’t given access to the exercise, the student actors played their roles using a vintage Viscount passenger aircraft to simulate the crash and ensuing injuries from 9 a.m. to noon near the International Air Cargo Terminal on Vermillion Avenue.

Airport Director Larry Brown said media had to stay outside the fence of the airport or stay in a conference room as if it were a real emergency.

The Brownsville police and fire departments, city and county EMS, the Texas Department of Public Safety and several federal agencies then responded to the simulation.

“The things that are going to be critical is the fire department assessing the situation quickly and the medical side of things, like getting patients triaged and separating the people who are slightly injured so we can get the people who are more critically injured treated more quickly; things like that,” Johnston said. “So, all those items will be tested as we go through the process.”

After the simulation, Johnston said officials would meet to discuss what went wrong and how to prevent those instances in the event of a real disaster.

“If we see, you know what, that this one individual didn’t have a radio and that sure would have helped us then we’ll make sure that we get them a radio,” Johnston said. “If someone says this procedure didn’t seem to work because we had to take two extra minutes to go around this way to get some place; then you know what, let’s fix that.”

And one side effect of the simulation Johnston hopes for is that residents and tourists know Brownsville is doing all it can to ensure people it is practicing and preparing in case an accident does happen at the airport.

“You can never be completely prepared because something always changes during an emergency,” Johnston said. “But you can always be preparing for an actual incident.”

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