The following article appeared in the DTH about the MCI drills that several members of SORS (Clint Osborn, Jordan Coates, Chris Dye, Cameron Lambert, and many others) put on for the DTCC EMT-B and EMT-I classes.
County gauges response efforts
By: Gray Caldwell, Assistant City Editor
Issue date: 11/15/06 Section: City
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Imagine you’re standing on a packed bus riding home from school one day. The driver is about to make a stop, when all of a sudden a school bus runs through the intersection and rams into the side of your bus. Both buses slam into the side of a building.
Everyone at the scene is screaming, several people were thrown from the buses, and there are a dozen life-threatening injuries. How should first responders react?
That was the dilemma EMT students from across Orange County trained for Tuesday night.
With help from volunteers, East Chapel Hill High School students and other EMT students who participated in the drill as victims, the EMTs-in-training got hands-on experience for the first time.
“At first it was intimidating when you have everyone screaming and blood on the floor,” said UNC junior Melanie Santos, an EMT student. “We’ve never done anything with real blood, only lesson scenarios for maybe five minutes.”
Santos said she was “pretty impressed” with how the students handled the stressful situation.
The event – which involved 27 victims, three ambulances, two fire trucks and a converted school bus – was staged to provide an example of a mass-casualty incident.
Durham Technical Community College EMT students, the South Orange Rescue Squad, Orange County Emergency Management and the Chapel Hill Fire Department all participated in the staged event.
Clint Osborn, who designed the drill, said such massive incidents aren’t as rare as one would think.
“We get to do this,” he said. “This isn’t totally out of the ordinary for us in the county.”
Osborn cited multiple-car pileups on the interstate and Franklin Street celebrations as similar scenarios.
“That’s essentially a scheduled mass-casualty incident,” he said. “You’ve got burn victims, alcohol overdoses …”
Tuesday was the second night the drill had been run, but some guidelines were added to help the students better execute it.
David Silfen, Orange County coordinator for Durham Tech, said learning structure during stressful events is important.
“It’s kind of like organized chaos,” he said. “The worst thing that could happen on a (mass-casualty incident) is everybody just running in and doing their own thing. Nothing gets done.”
Not everything went perfectly in the drill, and several of the victims ended up dying.
One of them was Michelle Gear, a sophomore East Chapel Hill drama student, who said putting on the makeup – a lot of blood made of corn syrup – was one of the most taxing parts of the night.
“I died of a head injury,” Gear said. “I think I was worst off of everyone except the pregnant girl.”
Silfen said that sadly, death is part of being an EMT, but events like Tuesday’s help students prepare for making tough decisions.
“EMS is really interesting,” he said. “You learn by making mistakes.”
The event gave Gear a newfound respect for emergency responders.
“I didn’t know how much work actually went into the EMTs, and I can appreciate it now,” she said.
All in all, Silfen said the night went by pretty successfully.
“The biggest problem tonight will be the cleanup.”
Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.
