Dress rehearsal for disasters
Emergency responders test their readiness in daylong exercise
By ERIC HUGHES, Staff
Intelligencer Journal
Published: Jul 28, 2007 12:12 AM EST
LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. - Col. Xavier Stewart bent down next to the "victim" and applied a deep red substance to her skin.
He took his time, careful to make it appear the "victim" was in fact injured. When satisfied, he stood up and went back to his microphone.
"Anybody else need any moulage?" Stewart asked the crowd milling around him.
He repeated the question: "Anybody else need any moulage?"
Such was the early-morning atmosphere during Operation Red Rose II, which took place Friday at Lancaster County Public Safety Training Center in East Hempfield Township.
The exercise, in its second year, drew about 500 people from some 60 local, state and federal agencies to test and evaluate their responses in an emergency situation.
That's where the moulage — makeup intended to make a person or training dummy appear injured — came into play.
"We do this so that they train together and are better prepared to save those of the commonwealth," said Stewart, the Pennsylvania National Guard officer in charge of the training.
Participating federal agencies included the FBI Hazardous Material Response Team (Hazmat); the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
State-level participants included the National Guard, Emergency Management Agency, state police, Department of Health and Department of Environmental Protection. Six Lancaster city and county agencies and departments participated as well.
Participants came from as far away as Pittsburgh.
Red Rose II began with a news briefing at 7:30 a.m. and lasted well into the afternoon, folding a wide variety of emergency-response activities into its overall scenario, billed as a "mass casualty" or "mass destruction" response.
They included initial response, search and rescue, evacuation, crime scene preservation and mass decontamination.
An explosion at a "coffee shop" got everyone moving. The scenario stipulated that cleaning agents had been stored in the kitchen and were vaporized in the blast, so rescuers wore breathing apparatus, and the "injured" had to be decontaminated.
An incident with a school bus also involved contamination. Both adult and child volunteers were carried by stretcher to the decontamination area.
Not far away, rescuers used video cameras mounted on long poles to search for victims trapped in rubble in the "confined space" exercise.
To add to the realism of each situation — a high-speed chase, an explosion — participants were not informed of the nature of the situation beforehand.
Some tests included the moulaged volunteers, while others used mannequins.
Though the Pennsylvania National Guard — and more specifically, the Directorate of Military Support to Civil Authorities — developed the training program, participating agencies were allowed to give input so the exercises would be relevant to their needs.
"This input was then included in the scenario ... which would trigger an event that would result in one of the participants having to react," Stewart said.
Asked about the objective of Operation Red Rose II, Stewart was hard-pressed to limit himself to just one.
Beyond testing whether responders could meet established standards for rescue work, of utmost importance was that the agencies learn to work together, so if tragedy ever strikes, they'll be ready, he said.
It is important to "build a good working relationship with all of the participating agencies, understand roles and relationships with first responders and work as a team," he said.