WINNIPEG — They train for the incidents they hope will never happen. The Winnipeg Airport Fire Rescue crew are trained to handle almost every situation.
On Tuesday, the group, along with WFPS and members of the Department of National Defense teamed up to run three different critical incident scenarios, including a mock plane crash.
PHOTO GALLERY: Winnipeg Airport Fire Rescue team train during a mock plane crash
Crews arrived on scene to find a plane, ripped in half and smoking. They had to quickly assess the situation, put out any fires and search and rescue survivors. Not an easy task when there’s a multitude of variables.
“With any crash like this it’s going to be a different scenario,” said firefighter John Oosterhuis. “You cant script anything so we want to try to throw in a couple diff wrinkles every time and learn something new. We want to find out what we’re good at and what we need to improve.”
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It’s a situation the group runs twice a year to ensure they are able to handle whatever may be thrown at them. They respond to medical calls almost daily and around 100 critical plane incidents each year. That can include anything from critically low fuel levels that result in emergency landings or potential engine failures. If a plane catches on fire they are prepared.
“Once we arrive on scene we will knock down as much fire as we can to allow passengers to escape,” said Fire Captain Jim Abram. “At that point we will have called WFPS and they will be responding as well for assitance with evacuation, extrication and medical services.”
WATCH: Breaking down the training with Winnipeg Airport Fire Rescue crew
That’s the point of the exercise. In a real life situation, these teams don’t know what they will have to deal with or where. Airport Fire Rescue is the primary command for all incidents at the airport, but if there is a plane crash in the city they are often also called to help.
In 2002 Airport Fire Rescue was called in to help WFPS at the scene of a plane crash at a busy downtown intersection. A small Keystone plane had gone down at Logan and McPhillips.
Airport Fire Rescue’s trucks are equipped differently than a regular fire truck. They hold more water and foam and they have infrared scanning equipment that can seek out hot spots from the outside of the fuselage.
The team also closely follows aviation incidents around the world and debriefs how the teams responded and what they could have done had the situation occurred in Winnipeg.
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One specific incident that has been reviewed multiple times is a crash from 1989 in Dryden, Ontario where 24 were killed. It crashed after only 15 seconds because it was not able to attain sufficient altitude to clear the trees beyond the end of the runway, due to ice and snow on the wings.
“That was a good accident to review because it fit with all Canadian airports… the environment was there, the snow, the bush,” said Abram.
More recently, his team studied the crash of Asiana Flight 214 in San Francisco which killed 3 people.
“We are able to see where we may have shortcomings in a response like that,” he said. “If it went poorly we will look to see if we have any of those bad habits and try to weed them out.
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