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County holds disaster exercise
By M. Dirk Langeveld , Staff Writer
Sunday, May 20, 2007
FRYEBURG - A corner of the Fryeburg Fairgrounds was crowded Saturday
with emergency vehicles and the bodies of injured disaster victims, but don't
start calling people to see if they're all right.
The crews and victims were participating in a training exercise to test the
response capabilities of county departments in the event of a mass-casualty
incident. The event was organized by the Oxford County Emergency Management
Agency.
"I'm very excited that we're actually out here on the ground practicing," said
Scott Parker, director of the county EMA.
The scenario called for multiple victims from a nightmarish accident on the
busiest day of the Fryeburg Fair, which is held the first week of October.
According to Bill Haynes, director of the Waterford EMA and a public information
officer for the drill, the volunteer fairgoers were injured when a crashing
helicopter sent debris flying in all directions.
If that weren't bad enough, the event also called for one of the pieces of
wreckage to hit a barrel of nitric acid on the back of a pickup truck, creating
a hazardous contamination on some of the grounds.
Haynes said the event included participants from 20 fire departments, 12 rescue
services and 10 police departments.
"Those are all scripted," he said. "They're part of the Level 3 alert."
Yellow flags marked the sites of casualties, and volunteer victims were given
tags to identify the severity of their injuries. Each victim had a story to
tell, having been briefed on how they got their particular wounds.
Lisa Costello said she had been blinded by something after the crash occurred
and received a head wound. She also said she was "really cold," although that
was more a symptom of the dreary morning.
Near the back of the field where the exercise was staged, Deena Emerson and Matt
Jensen of Fryeburg Rescue tended to Heather Gould, who had been upgraded to a
first priority case after saying she couldn't feel her legs. She said she had
been hit by wreckage from the helicopter and was experiencing neck and back
pain.
The emergency workers cut no corners in their response to the mock disaster,
lending an eerie sense of realism to the drama. But the exercise was not without
its moments of levity.
"I feel like a mummy," laughed Gould as Emerson and Jensen strapped her to a
backboard. She also noted a new injury: unable to move her arms in the straps, a
mosquito was biting her neck without repercussion.
Many of the victims had been outside in the cold for much of the morning, and an
administrative decision was later made to get the remaining victims off the
ground and into the ambulances where they could warm up. Parker also said a
victim started to have respiratory trouble during the drill, so the exercise was
briefly halted to treat him.
Parker said the participating units had been preset for the exercise.
"Things are going to unfold a lot more slowly," he said, noting that such a
setup would lead to better overall organization in the response to a real
disaster.
Parker said that county towns are excellent at mutual aid for small-scale
disasters, but have not had as much experience in county-wide responses to mass
casualty disasters. He said the exercise would help the towns coordinate in such
an event.
Some of the EMA's specialized vehicles, such as the Mass Casualty Incident
trailer, were present at the drill. The CERT/ARES trailer, run by the Community
Emergency Response Team and the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, helped relay
communications at the scene.
"It's such a burden for communications when something like this happens," said
Brad Saunders of the CERT/ARES team. Saunders said he and other members of the
team would handle some of the communications for responders.
According to Ron Blake, a staff member of His Place Teen Center in Oxford,
several members of the center played casualties or assisted with ham radio
operations at the scene. Blake was a participant himself, a victim of helicopter
shrapnel.
The day also saw training by CERT and the Community Animal Response Team in
setting up shelters at the Molly Ockett Middle School. After being transported
by ambulance to the school, the victims were transformed into natural disaster
victims who needed a place to stay.
Volunteers from CERT registered the victims as they arrived from the Fairgrounds
before releasing them from the exercise. According to Chet Charette, director of
the Fryeburg EMA, the school is a regional Red Cross shelter that can hold up to
400 people.
He said the CERT volunteers were also providing "welfare and comfort" to the
volunteer victims in the form of food and warmth.
In the nearby bus garage, the Community Animal Response Team had set up a
temporary shelter for five dogs and three cats, all pets of volunteers. CART is
designed to take in the pets of those going to the Red Cross shelter at the
school.
"It was really good to have the exercise," said Storm Coleman, head of pet
registration. She said the event allowed CART to figure out what parts of the
registration paperwork required clarification.
Ken Ward, the CART director, said the organization hopes to set up another pet
refuge in Dixfield and have the shelters set up in advance of any disaster.
"It was a learning experience," he said of the exercise.
Fryeburg Fair disaster drill tests
agencies
Helicopter crash, chemical spill spell 'practice' for
emergency responders
David Carkhuff, Conway Daily Sun
5/22/2007
FRYEBURG—It's a nightmare scenario — a helicopter crashes during the Fryeburg
Fair, throwing shrapnel into a crowd of bystanders and bursting open a nearby
tank of nitric acid, scalding other onlookers.
This was the simulation that made for a realistic test for emergency responders
at the Fryeburg Fairgrounds Saturday.
"We had about 230 first responders, between New Hampshire and Maine; we had
three fire departments and two EMS agencies out of Conway," said Scott Parker,
Oxford County emergency management director who organized the drill.
The simulation depicted what would happen if a helicopter plunged to the ground
during the Fryeburg Fair, and part of the debris from the downed helicopter
penetrated one of several 50-gallon drums of nitric acid, splashing this highly
corrosive and toxic fertilizer agent on passersby.
The crash started car fires in the packed parking lot. A piece of the exploding
aircraft flew into a barrel of nitric acid that was in a pickup truck, poisoning
and burning a number of nearby people.
"It was very realistic. We literally had 40 patients on the ground with injuries
that had to be dealt with, all over the place," Parker said.
Also part of the mock helicopter crash and simulated spill of nitric acid, six
people had to be hosed down by fire trucks. They were members of the Cumberland
County Dive Team, wearing wet suits, Parker explained. A team put these mock
victims through a decontamination tent and eventually into a "cold zone" where
ambulances waited to whisk them away to the hospital.
Students from Kennett High School played the part of victims, wearing mass
casualty incident tags and medical tags. Steve Woodcock, assistant principal at
the high school, helped assemble this cast of participants.
Ed Duffy, nine months into the job of Conway emergency management director,
helped with Oxford County's drill by staging at the Memorial Hospital in North
Conway.
"We had eight students from Kennett High School simulating that they had
injuries at the Fryeburg Fair, and the Memorial Hospital did an excellent job of
registering those students and treating them and performing all of the tasks
they were hoping to do for their exercise," Duffy said.
"It went really well. The training exercises are a great way to find out what
you know and what you don't know so you can be prepared when it's a real event,"
he noted.
Memorial Hospital tested its emergency tracking system, which was developed for
a huge influx of patients. The nightmare scenario left plenty of victims
scattered around the back of the fairgrounds.
"We had between 30 and 40 casualties there, and then adjacent to that, caused by
the helicopter crash, was a hazardous materials exposure from a truck carrying
nitric acid," Parker noted.
The emergency-response drill was conducted from 8:15 a.m. to roughly 1:30 p.m.
Officials gave plenty of notice to organizers of the Home, Garden and Flower
Show at Fryeburg Fairgrounds, an event that took place at the front of the
fairgrounds.
Roy and Dick Andrews, organizers of the Fryeburg Fair, were instrumental in
supporting the emergency-response drill, Parker said.
"When they embraced it, I said,' Whoa, good. I'll put together the exercise and
get the first responders together,'" Parker recalled.
The drill was a marvel of coordination, involving 14 fire departments, including
two from Conway. Ten different emergency medical service agencies were
represented, two from New Hampshire, and the rest from Oxford and Cumberland
counties in Maine.
"On the haz-mat (hazardous materials) side, that was an interesting piece
because we brought in the Bridgton Haz-Mat team from Cumberland County, we
brought in the New Page Haz Mat team from Rumford (the local paper company) and
we brought in our county's decontamination team," Parker noted.
Fryeburg, Oxford County Sheriff's Office and Maine State Police participated as
law enforcement agencies.
"I think the major thing that we pulled out of this was, in a big event, it
takes a lot of coordination between the primary EMS providers, fire department
chiefs and police. We've been training for this one for a year and a half,"
Parker said.
Unlike a rehearsal on paper, the live exercise involved a flurry of activity.
"We had to cram a whole day's worth of stuff into a five-hour period, things had
to move along a little bit quicker," Parker said.
The drill was an eye-opener for Fryeburg Fire Chief Ozzie Sheaff, who played the
role of incident commander.
"I had to control the whole thing, make sure we had all the people in place, the
operations team together to handle everything," he recalled.
"I've been to trainings where we've had situations like that, but not to that
scale," Sheaff said.
Asked what lessons were learned, Parker concluded, "I learned that our first
responders are really ready to step up to the plate if called upon."
For more information about the Oxford County emergency management department,
call Parker at (207) 743-6336.
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Oxford County
