Roanoke – Fortunately, it’s not as bad as it looks. And it looks pretty bad. A plane crashes - and to make matters worse, it hits a couple of cars -- leaving passengers and drivers injured with luggage scattered everywhere.
It’s part of a training scenario involving about 200 people including about 45 volunteers playing victims.
“And when responders come up, they have to triage. They have to sort through everybody, treat what they find, and transport to the hospital. The whole thing,” explained Ben Cook the airport’s director of public safety.
The FAA says localities need to do something like this every three years. Cook says for good reason.
“We miss things. Sometimes you may not be able to utilize a resource. You may have that resource and don’t use it. So there’s lots of things that we’ll learn as we do this thing that we’ll put down and say, Okay, next time we’ll do this,” Cook said.
It takes months to plan and coordinate a simulation like this - that can be over in a couple of hours -- But the lessons are permanent and the chief says will make a big difference if they are faced with the real thing.
“We’re gonna do a debrief. We’re gonna talk to all the responders from all the jurisdictions that showed up. We’re even gonna talk to the people who are not first responders, but the Red Cross, the medical examiner’s office, people that are part of this scenario that play a small role, a small part of the actual patient care, but a huge part of this scenario. We’ll talk to all them and just get their perspective, because you as a responder may look at things a little differently than, say, somebody from the Red Cross or somebody from the police department could look different things differently, as a firefighter would. So everybody’s perspective is important,” Cook said.