The Rapid City Regional Airport's command tower received an alert at about 8:45 a.m. that a plane was having engine trouble. Upon hearing the alert, the air traffic controller picked up the emergency phone and told emergency crews to get ready for the worst.
Fortunately, it was only a drill as emergency responders Saturday practiced what to do in a real emergency.
About 15 minutes later, news reached the tower that a plane carrying more than 50 passengers had crashed on Longview Drive. Within moments firefighters, medical response teams and law enforcement were en route to contain the simulated disaster.
Emergency responders from Pennington County and beyond had their skills put to the test since the FAA requires the airport to conduct a full-scale emergency exercise every three years.
"This allows us to practice as if it was a real world situation in a crash environment," said Pete Girtz, interim airport director of the Rapid City Regional Airport. "It gives us all a lot of hands-on training as well for the confidence to community that we practice for these things to ready for a large scale disaster."
The Rapid Valley Fire Department, Rapid City Fire Department, Rapid City Police Department, the Red Cross and the Pennington County Sheriff's Office were some of the organizations that participated.
Firefighters were the first on the grizzly looking scene to knock down the fire described in the simulation and get the wounded from the crash site to an emergency triage center that was set up near the impact zone.
More than 50 volunteers signed up to play the role of the passengers, who had suffered varying degrees of injury.
The volunteers were made up with fake blood, burns and other wounds, at the Rapid City Regional Hospital. Each was given a card with their vital statistics and what type of injuries they had suffered or if they had been killed on impact.
The victims had to be quickly assessed by emergency teams, then separated into different categories depending on the severity of their wounds. They had to be diagnosed and treated on-site by the Red Cross and other medical personnel as part of the exercise.
Airport operations technician Gary English, who organized the volunteers and was one of the people evaluating the response teams, said the exercise went smoothly for the most part. Communications between the tower and the emergency crews was excellent, he said.
To be sure, while the simulation was designed to be as realistic as possible, a real plane crash creates certain challenges that can't be recreated.
"In an actual airplane crash, you have that 'fog of war,' there's a lot of chaos and a lot of things that go on when there's a real world situation." Girtz said. "The scene becomes quite horrific; we tried to simulate that out there, but it's still far from an actual event. But we can train to certain level with the simulation and use that knowledge to help us in a worst-case scenario."
Another evaluator, Alexa White of Pennington County Emergency Management, said the operation appeared to be well-handled for the most part. Not everything went exactly as planned, but that's actually a good thing in a simulation.
"This kind of thing never goes perfect, but you don't want it to because we want to learn, we want to better our processes and find out how we would do things differently," she said. "It always goes a little bit faster than it would in a real world situation, so we try to figure out what might have happened had something else occurred."
Source: http://rapidcityjournal.com
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