Making Sure Local Emergency Workers are Prepared for the Worst

Author: Lindsey Whitton

Last Thursday I lay, confused and alone, on the dark basement floor of the Middlebury Town Municipal Building. I couldn't see anything, but I could sense rescue workers somewhere above me. I heard a Porter Medical Center dispatcher requesting all available personnel to respond to the bomb explosion at my location. The basement was eerily quiet except for the disembodied sound of the radios. I prayed rescue workers would find me, half covered with rubble, unable to call for help, and bleeding from an open chest wound.

Ten minutes later, however, I heard another call go out. A school bus of sixth graders had been involved in a massive accident. This second disaster would divert some of the available rescue personnel. My chances for survival were diminishing rapidly. How well could the town of Middlebury deal with concurrent, multiple crises? I was about to find out.

Fortunately for me I was only pretending, working as a volunteer victim for the annual disaster drill sponsored by Porter Hospital and other local rescue groups, including the Middlebury Volunteer Ambulance Association, the local fire company and the Middlebury police. Every year the town dedicates signifigant time and money to an elaborately planned, unnervingly realistic exercise so that all triage team participants can practice their roles. I thought being a victim might be interesting, but because the full range of participants took the drill so seriously, it turned out to also be an unsettling and moving experience.

I was assigned to play the role of the second most severely wounded victim. One of the organizers explained that I would later die of cardiac arrest after arriving at Porter Hospital. There is something strange about having someone tell you how you will die — and despite the imaginary nature of the exercise, I began to feel a bit nervous.

I changed into a pair of baggy yellow shorts and two tee shirts. One of the assistants helped me strap on a fake chest between the two shirts. The "chest" had a hole with a tube attached to it filled with artificial blood that I could make squirt out of the hole by squeezing a little rubber handheld pump. Burns were painted onto my arms and my face, with more fake blood poured over my chest and into my hair. One little boy ran away from me, screaming, so I must have looked fairly gruesome.

I met my "mother," a sweet woman who wrote down all the information about me: name, height, weight, hair color and so on. When I warned her that I was going to die she laughed and rolled her eyes. "I can't believe it! My mock disaster daughter died last year too."

The motley crowd of victims were finally ready for their close-ups. The extremely wounded had fake stomachs with guts spilling out, horrific strap on leg burns, masks with life threatening head injuries and blood everywhere. The walking wounded had more minor limb injuries, bumps, bruises and again, blood everywhere. People were milling about, talking casually and munching on the food that was set up on a table in the corner. It was a very strange, Hollywood-horror-movie-set moment.

We soon got into position. I was lying closest to where the explosion was 'detonated'. Cardboard representing rubble was artfully arranged on my fallen body. More 'victims' were situated around the dank basement and stairwell. It was time to begin.

My first reaction was that each minute seemed like an hour. Nobody seemed to be trying to rescue us. We knew that the police had to first secure the building but it seemed to take forever. As my eyes began to adjust to the dark, all I could see were the outlines of turned over furniture and grotesquely injured bodies.

Everybody who was not 'unconscious' like me screamed for help. The desperate calls bounced across the basement and seemed terrifyingly real to me as I lay on the floor in silence. "Somebody help me!!" "I can't move and I can't breath!" "Where are my legs?? I can't feel my legs!" "GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!"

I began imagining how victims of terrorist acts must feel. The despair and extreme anxiety were palpable. I wondered how I would be feeling if I was also experiencing tremendous pain. I wished that I could scream

Finally some rescuers dressed in full fire fighting regalia, complete with gas masks, broke into the room. I waited to be noticed. Some EMTs came into the room and began assesing each patient and tagging them according to their triage category — black for dead or unable to save, red for the most seriously injured who need immediate care, yellow for those who needed medical treatment but could wait for those more seriously injured and green for those with minor injuries, "the walking wounded." A red tag, thrown onto my chest, immediately stuck to the drying blood.

Suddenly all the rescuers left the room with the "walking wounded." We watched their flashlights swing up the stairs and a chorus of panicky screams implored them to come back and not abandon us. Later we heard that a second explosive device had been found by the police, not yet detonated, and everyone had been ordered away from the scene. As a victim, this was one of the most alarming moments. Just when it seemed that an orderly evacuation was about to be orchestrated according to triage procedure, some of us were once again left alone in the dark.

Finally we heard the muffled call of another rescue worker. The screams for help started again. We realized they had been saving the people on the stairway first, which seemed strange since they were probably the least injured. Finally three exhausted firefighters returned to the basement.

They stumbled around without even a flashlight, their eyes unaccustomed to the dark. They carried the patients out one by one depending on who they came across first. Soon there were only three of us left — the three in the corner where the explosion had apparently occurred and the three most severely injured. And then I was the only victim left in the room.

The firefighters came back down after a few minutes. They couldn't see me but I could see them perfectly because my eyes were so adjusted to the dark. They shuffled around the room, bumping into debris and calling out, "Is there anyone here? Is there anyone left." I lay there silently, staring at them intensely as if I could will them to find me. I was supposed to have labored breathing so I breathed extra hard. Finally one of them heard me and crawled across the floor until he felt my hand.

They miraculously navigated the room without falling or dropping me. I was bloody, burned and bruised, lying helpless in the arms of the firefighters. My head was flopped to the side and in the dim light of the upstairs hall, it seemed very real.

When we got outside, the three original firefighters were joined by a few of their coworkers. Suddenly one of them noticed the little white rubber pump in my hand that made the blood squirt out of the chest wound.

"What is that in her hand!" he shouted.

"Looks like a grenade!" one of the others responded. I looked down; it did look a bit like a grenade.

"Who are you?" another firefighter asked.

They started putting me down on the pavement, and I suddenly realized that part of my costume shouldn't be interfering with the mock disaster. I quickly explained what the pump was. They all started laughing.

"We were about to leave you right here!" one said.

They carried me over to a grassy spot where a lot of rescue workers wearing aprons with their triage role in bold letters had assembled. There were medical supplies all around me, and I was soon lifted onto a stretcher. It was strange lying on the ground in the sunshine and seeing next to me bloody victims. Somebody monitored my deteriorating vital signs, all part of the script.

I heard my 'mother' shouting my name frantically, and I looked over and saw her arguing with the
police, who had blocked the area off with yellow tape and were holding a small crowd back. Another mother broke through the tape and ran through to her daughter before the police could stop her.

Soon two ambulances pulled up. I was the most injured victim present so my stretcher was quickly carried to the first ambulance. The EMTs began working on me immediately. They did everything they could in the ambulance and filled out a form for the people at the hospital.

When we arrived at Porter Hospital, the ambulance crew jumped out and carried the other victim in my ambulance into the hospital. I lay in the ambulance alone until my friend, Kevin Dougherty '03.5, an actual EMT on Middlebury Volunteer Ambulance Association (MVAA), happened to run by on the way back to his ambulance. He seemed stressed but he smiled when he saw me, smeared with fake blood and strapped onto a stretcher alone in the ambulance. He and another person lifted me out of the ambulance and brought me into the hospital.

In the emergency room I was surrounded by numerous people dressed in scrubs. They looked over the charts filled out by the two previous groups, inspected my wounds and discussed what to do next. They determined that I should go to the operating room immediately. As I was being wheeled down the hall to the operating room my monitor announced that I had died of cardiac arrest.

A nurse helped me get out of the stretcher, and I quickly left the crowded emergency room and ducked into an office to call a friend who came and picked me up. I was a little overwhelmed after my three hours of being a trauma victim.

After I washed off the blood, burns and bruises, I decided to go on a run, and I ended up back at Porter. I went inside to try to find my real clothes that I had forgotten in my haste, and I ended up catching the second half of the mock-disaster debriefing.

It was so interesting to listen to the different components of the rescue team discuss how their job had gone and what they could do to improve in a real situation. There were many different local agencies involved including the Middlebury Police Department, the Middlebury Fire Department, MVAA, Bristol Rescue, Vergennes Rescue, Cornwall Search and Rescue (K-9 unit), Porter Hospital and the Vermont State Police.

The police chief explained why he had evacuated the triage team when the second bomb was found. "It was a judgment call," he said. "We decided life over limb."

After Sept. 11, and in light of what is currently happening in the Middle East, there was an extra element of gravity to the experience of being a terrorist victim. I was extremely impressed with the town of Middlebury for allocating so many resources to a mock disaster drill. Our local relief workers, like those in other communities across the world, really are willing to risk their own safety and lives to help others. They have practiced and they are prepared.