Borough simulates mass casualty event

August 19, 2005

KATE KELLY/Frontiersman reporter

There was smoke, flying debris, a dozen dead and fears of fatal water contamination Wednesday in the Valley.

But it was considered a privilege to take part in such a disastrous scenario, since the Mat-Su Borough is one of only eight jurisdictions in the entire country to participate in the national Homeland Security terrorism drill, known locally as "Alaska Shield/Northern Edge."

With the help of several local agencies, volunteers and a $14,825 federal grant, the borough's emergency services personnel were able to test their ability to respond to a large-scale emergency situation, should one actually occur in the area.

"It was a great training opportunity for us," Emergency Management Programs Coordinator Bea Adler said Thursday. "This was all based on a terrorism scenario, but the same skills are needed for natural disasters such as earthquakes and large fires. To watch a room full of about 60 people actually engaged in wrestling with problems set for them and seeing them use their skills

effectively was very gratifying."

Beginning at 6 a.m. with serious, but mysterious, gastrointestinal illnesses that "stopped everybody cold" at the Emergency Operations Center in Wasilla, and ending with a "bomb explosion" in the Mat-Su Borough building back parking lot that left many "injured" or "dead," the exercise gave the Community Emergency Response Team, Job Corps nursing students from Alaska villages, and even Wasilla High School drama students a chance to test their own readiness for such an event.

Amid some smiles and giggles from "victims" lying in the borough parking lot strewn with charred pieces of wood and ragged chunks of cement, 21-year-old nursing student Priscilla Mann could definitely see the value of such a training opportunity.

When she was only 14 in Hooper Bay, her family faced an actual emergency when a cousin accidentally shot her 8-year-old brother in the stomach while the family prepared to go hunting, she said.

"They were pretty fast," she remembered of the emergency responders at that time who were able to save her brother. "I'm learning to stay calm and to listen to what the EMTs tell you. I think the emergency crew here should have been a little faster, though."

There seemed to be some timing errors during the drill, such as the smoke bomb going off after the borough building was evacuated and there were already bloody bodies scattered around the grounds - including one with a severed plastic foot and a broken pencil protruding from a fractured knee.

And there was some confusion over where to take victims after Valley Hospital became maxed out from 20 pretend patients.

But much of the event was based on true-to-life events that could actually happen here in our world of terrorism, Adler said. The strange stomach ailments afflicting people in Wasilla mimicked a synthetic agent called "saxitoxin," which mimics shellfish poisoning and can cause symptoms similar to anthrax.

"We wanted to find something that would be viable in water, but is not easily detected," Adler said. "In the exercise, we didn't want to do something that was totally off the wall and preposterous because we wanted to learn how to respond to a real event."

Although this drill was not designed to actually evaluate the actions and responses of emergency personnel and borough employees, it is being used to help the borough determine how to best respond in the event of an emergency or disaster. There will be another Alaska Shield event in 2007 that will serve as an evaluative tool.

Adler said preliminary discussions of the event revealed teamwork to be one of the strongest elements among responding agencies, but communication between them could have been better. And dealing with the imaginary element of the event posed some challenges, she said, even when the realistic "moulage" makeup done by Emergency Medical Services Training Coordinator Bill MacKreth enabled many to realize the seriousness of the scene.

"One of the hardest things to do was to mesh the drill with pretend injuries going to the hospital with Emergency Operations Center coordinators," she said. "The merging of that is very complex, and people sometimes get caught up in the imaginary world and then remember that they really do need a truck or a van to transport people to the medical sites. But everyone had fun, which will help engage even more of the community in future drills."

Indeed, as a few pale-faced borough employees playing fatalities attempted to sneak back into the building toward the end of the drill, one explained the physics of a dead person being able to walk around.

"We came back as zombies," the employee said with a snicker before being directed back to the grassy area designated for those with black ribbons tied to their arms.

Contact Kate Kelly at 352-2284.