Departments Team up for Safety Drill
By AMY V. TALIT, The Bristol Press
07/10/2005

BRISTOL — Senior Capt. Mark Martin, fire department training officer, learned a few lessons this week when members of the fire and police departments along with Bristol Hospital staff trained together to test response times and use of the various resources provided by each entity.

After the TOPOFF 3 terror alert and readiness drill in New London earlier this year, Barbara Banda, director of performance improvement for Bristol Hospital, and Martin got together to begin planning a drill. The drill would test the two companies in the event of a real-life situation involving unknown hazardous materials or a chemical fire.
The original plan, said Martin, was to test the fire department and hospital decontamination teams’ responses to a fire involving an unknown chemical that would require decontamination of all victims. He said originally, the plan was to have more victims than the hospital’s decontamination unit could effectively handle, thereby requiring the assistance of the fire department for added decontamination stations.

What Martin and Banda got however, was a multiple agency drill that tested everyone’s response to a potential terror attack. They got to practice dealing with a fire of unknown origin when victims are exposed to an unknown chemical contaminant.

Martin said firefighters were even able to test a new on-truck computer system the department recently purchased. The computer system has a large database of chemicals and how they reaction to the elements, water and other chemicals. It also can tell how to treat possible exposure and can tell what radius, if any, need be evacuated should the chemical leak or become exposed.

Using several junior volunteers from the hospital as well as a few of the employees’ children as ‘victims,’ Banda created several scenarios. Each ‘victim’ read a scenario when questioned by emergency service workers.

One scenario involved handling the outcome of a fire started near an unknown chemical.

When the firefighters arrived on the scene, they remained at a distance of 300 feet from the ‘fire,’which was in reality a maintenance garage in a back lot of the hospital that Martin had filled with smoke from a machine. They used binoculars and other resources including hospital maintenance staff to determine what the chemical could have been.

By using the binoculars, firefighters were able to determine the color of the smoke, often an indicator of the toxicity of a burning chemical. They could also tell how many potential victims there were and what their conditions appeared to be.

Once they were told what chemical may have leaked, they utilized the new computer database on the trucks to look up the toxicity of the chemical, how victims should be treated and the best method to extinguish the fire.

Though the scenario turned out to have been nothing more than a workplace accident, Martin said firefighters did not know that when they first responded to the scene, and it could have potentially been a terror-related fire.

He said that since 9/11, it is important for fire and other emergency personnel be aware of what they are going into. Training with scenarios like this is a good way to increase firefighters chances of saving more lives — including their own.

Martin said the drill also served to highlight issues that each entity needs to address within their own department. It can also highlight inter-agency problems like communication, before it is necessary to rely on them in an emergency situation.

Martin said since the new communications system went into effect for both the police and fire departments, the two agencies no longer have direct communication by radio and need to go through dispatch. He also said there is no radio communication with the hospital, again requiring all communication to go through central dispatch and the hospital switchboard. He said the dispatchers are good so it is not too bad having to go through them, but it would be easier to have direct communication capabilities.

For the drill, Martin said he chose to use the fire department training channel for communications, but found he was unable to communicate with the other two agencies involved. However, since it was only a drill, he decided not to tie up the dispatchers who needed to control real-life events.

“It slowed communications down a bit I think, but I didn’t want to confuse the situation and tie up the dispatchers,” said Martin.

Martin said despite the flaws highlighted by the drill within each agency, none of the issues would have been life-threatening.

Other than the new computer system, Martin said firefighters did not use any special gear such as their chemical fire fighting suits, but in the future he would like to have drills in which the suits are utilized.

Martin said, “Overall the goals of the drill were definitely accomplished, but I would like to test the fire department personnel more next time and I’d really like to use some of our specialized equipment.”

Additionally, said Martin, the fire department is due to receive its new decontamination trailer in the next several months, and he looks forward to training the firefighters on its use.

Martin said he hopes other companies in the city will be interested in having drills at their facilities. This would be an effort to not only further acclimate firefighters with their facility, but to give employees a chance to perform a drill simulating real-life scenarios that would require working in conjunction with emergency personnel.

“I’d really like the opportunity to work with area businesses and the people at their facilities for training not just the firefighters, but also the facility staff,” said Martin.

(source / full list of drills)