November 20, 2002 Feature
Story
Mock
Disaster at Utah State Tests Cache Valley's Emergency Preparation
 Emergency
rescue crews from throughout Cache Valley are awaiting a final
grade after a comprehensive and massive disaster drill Tuesday
morning at Utah State’s University Inn tested the skills
of hundreds of response personnel.
The drill simulated a disaster in which a construction crane
collapsed the upper floors of the University Inn, injuring more
than 75 people, 50 of them seriously.
Utah State University Police Sgt. Lynn Wright, emergency management
coordinator at Utah State, said the disaster exercise was a
comprehensive undertaking involving the coordinated efforts
of various city and county emergency response organizations,
including hospitals, fire and police departments, emergency
medical technicians, Red Cross, Civil Air Patrol, transportation
crews, Utah State Campus Emergency Response Teams (CERT) and
many others.
 The
CERT teams performed extremely well, Wright said, especially
given the number of seriously injured patients they had to treat
and transport from the upper floors of the building.
"It was exceptional training for them and, in fact, for
all of the people who participated in the exercise," he
said.
Brady Hansen, training officer for the Logan City Fire Department,
echoed Wright’s assessment of the situation as events
were still unfolding. Hansen, who is also a CERT trainer, said
the CERT teams did an exceptional job working in coordination
with medical professionals from the fire department and other
valley response teams.
"It is critical that we get to train together like this,"
Hansen said. "It gives us [fire department paramedics]
confidence and knowledge about how much the CERT teams know,
and it teaches us that they are a good, reliable resource. It
also gives us a chance to find out where we need to train more."
 Logan
City Fire Department Capt. Randy Einzinger, a medical group
leader for the exercise, said the drills give emergency rescue
crews the chance to pick up on possible snags during training
so if a real disaster ever occurs, the teams will be ready.
Einzinger was in charge of transportation, treatment and triage
of patients, and his radio was in constant action as he communicated
with various other response units during the operation.
He said transportation is often one of the biggest problems
in mass casualty disasters, and in this case, he was coordinating
ambulances, LTD buses and Utah State shuttle buses to transport
patients to either Logan Regional Hospital, Cache Specialty
Hospital or to Red Cross operations, where the non-injured patients
were transported.
"This is a complex exercise, but it allows us to get to
know and test a lot of the players who would be involved in
the case of a real emergency," Hansen said. "This
kind of event pulls us out of our ‘normal’ roles
and gives us a chance to accomplish different training scenarios
we might see. We don’t get the chance to ‘overwhelm’
our crews, but that’s what might happen in a real situation."
Contact: Utah State Public Relations and Marketing, (435)
797-1351
Writer: Tim Vitale, (435) 797-1356
Photos courtesy Utah State Photo Services
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