HALIFAX – It may have been just a simulation, but for the first-responders involved, a major disaster drill carried out in Halifax on Saturday was as real as it gets.
Emergency staff — from paramedics to firefighters — organized a mass casualty exercise involving the QEII Health Sciences Center and IWK Hospital to find out how systems and personnel would respond in a disaster.
The scenario they used involved a tour bus hitting a truck carrying a toxic substance.
More than 100 volunteers were prepped with victim profiles, and in some cases gruesome makeup, on Saturday, to make the exercise as real as possible.
“My injury is that I was walking along Barrington St. when this accident happened and I got hit with a broken windshield, and i got hit with some glass and there’s glass in my eye,” said Mike Smyth, one of the simulated victims.
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Once the scenario got underway, the ER nurses such as Cindi Allen attended to patients suffering from a wide range of injuries.
Saturday’s exercise brought together police, firefighters, military personnel, security staff, doctors and paramedics to find out exactly how the whole communication process would work, if a disaster like this really were to happen.
Capital Health’s Health Service Manager Debbie Phillips said there is one sometimes-overlooked part of disaster response that also played a role in the drill — the victims’ families
“Family members go to the hospital, if they think that their loved one is at the hospital,” she said. “If the hospital’s not prepared to care for these distressed people, then that too becomes overwhelming… and that means the people that need to care for injured people are tied up doing something else.”
This kind of large-scale exercise hasn’t been organized here in halifax for more than three years. It took months of planning and involved more than 50 medical staff, but just about everyone said it was worth it.
“I think we’ve learned a lot from this today,” Allen said. “I think it’s a great thing for us to all participate in so that in the event that this ever did happen that people were more prepared.”
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