Escambia County Exercise, Part II

I was planning on writing this as we drove home from the exercise... but I was pretty much brain dead, and it felt a little too much like work.

Overall, things went very smoothly. It wasn't a large or complex event, which helped, but there is always the potential for these things to go off the rails. The airport folks had rounded up 120 victim volunteers from NAS Pensacola - a bunch of young enlisted to play the roles of the airline passengers. I swear, I am going to get my victims from the military at every opportunity in the future; these kids were great. They were enthusiastic, followed directions, and were self organizing.

Since we were there working for the county, but the county was participating as a 'junior' partner to the airport and City of Pensacola, we had to be cautious not to offend or overstep ourselves. In many ways, this made the day fairly easy for us, since most of the prep and set up was done by the airport folks.

The 'crash' site was basic, consisting of a debris field located at the approach end of runway 8. The scenario involved the crash of a commuter airliner with 85 souls on board, resulting in a mass casualty incident. The city/county coordination was going to be key simply because even though the accident occurred on city property, and the primary response agency was Pensacola Fire Rescue, the city does not have any Emergency Medical Service (EMS) assets.

In addition to the city fire department, county fire department, county EMS, and law enforcement, a goal from the county standpoint was to test procedures for asking for and deploying mutual aid assets from outside the county. In events such as these, emergency managers need to be able to move resources into the area quickly and efficiently. Also being tested was hospital surge capacity. Many of the victims were loaded onto ambulances and buses and actually transported to four area hospitals. This allowed local emergency rooms to practice handling a sudden influx of patients requiring immediate critical care.

In the end, everything came off fine from an exercise standpoint. That's not to say that the participating agencies didn't learn some lessons (that's the point) but it all ran smoothly. I even got to facilitate the 'hot wash', the after exercise discussion between all the participants where they discuss what went well, and what went wrong. Fun stuff.

I'll get some more photos posted up somewhere soon.