Lebanon and Boone County first responders launched a countywide training to prepare the responders for the possibility of a large-scale emergency in the area.
On Friday, Oct. 20, the Lebanon Fire Department, Lebanon Police Department, Boone County EMS, Boone County Health Department and more participated in the training with a scenario revolving around an act of domestic terrorism at the Co-Alliance facility at 400 Coombs St. in Lebanon. According to Matt Young, Lebanon Fire Department Captain, the crews were informed that a disgruntled employee detonated a bomb inside a van that spread fires to surrounding buildings and exposed the area to hazardous materials, resulting in casualties and wounded patients seeking treatment.
“With the scenario, our dispatch was an explosion,” Young said. “We arrived on scene, and we did have some background information as far as it was a disgruntled employee, van exploded (and) was on fire (and) we had a possible hazardous materials leak with anhydrous ammonia.”
The training allowed the responders to employ triage services for the patients injured, practice decontamination procedures as a result of the anhydrous ammonia, control the fires that resulted for the initial scenario and work together as a unit of first responders from across Boone County.
“Any time we train on any type of mass casualty incident, that is what we call a low frequency, high risk operation,” Young said. “They don’t happen very often, so we don’t have a lot of experience to draw from, so that always really ramps up these scenarios.”
The training had been planned by the Health Department and the first responders for the past six months before it was eventually launched. The training featured actors who portrayed injured patients that were assessed for their injuries, transported with gurneys and much more to test the protocols for addressing patient reports on the scene of a large-scale incident.
“Arriving on scene and seeing dozens of patients standing there waiting to be treated, it really puts the pressure on incident commanders and our responders as far as triaging those patients, prioritizing patients and then getting all the resources on scene that we need to treat everybody,” Young said. “It was great to be able to come together and operate seamlessly with all of our mutual aid partners and public safety partners.”
Young concluded by stating that employing large-scale trainings that incorporate departments from across the city and the county helps the first responders prepare for the possibility of a similar, devastating incident occurring within the borders of Boone County.
“It really pays off when it comes to a large-scale scenario-based training like this or on the actual incident when we’re able to really operate as one entity regardless of jurisdictional boundaries,” Young said. “This is a real-world scenario that could happen at any time, and so to be able to train on this and put our eyes on potential hazards that we could be facing is very valuable. You get to see it. You get to smell it. You get to do everything that we would do on a real incident.”
A video of the training may be found on the City of Lebanon Fire Department Facebook page produced by members of the Communications Department for the City of Lebanon.