BURLINGTON — Firefighters, paramedics and police officers will get valuable hands-on training Saturday at a mock disaster drill that organizers say will be the largest such exercise in recent years.
Based at Burlington’s summer festival grounds, the drill will challenge emergency responders with a simulated school bus crash that leaves several students and others injured.
Students from the Burlington Area School District will portray accident victims in the mock disaster.
Burlington Fire Chief Alan Babe said 25 or more neighboring agencies are planning to participate in the exercise, which is expected to start at 8 a.m. and continue for several hours.
Babe said it will be the first major hands-on simulated disaster drill in recent memory in Burlington and surrounding areas on the west side of Racine County.
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“It should be a great learning opportunity for all involved,” he said. “It just makes everyone better.”
The drill is scheduled to begin at about 8 a.m. Saturday and continue for several hours, with police officers arriving later to work on their accident-reconstruction skills.
Participating agencies are looking forward to the event, which will allow them to test their ability to handle all aspects of a mass casualty incident, including patient triage and transport to hospitals taking part in the mock disaster.
Rochester Fire Chief Jack Biermann said his department will have an ambulance crew and a chief participating in the exercise. Real-life simulations, Biermann said, are more effective than most classroom instruction in training emergency workers.
“It’s not something that happens on your average daily calls,” he said. “It’ll put it all into perspective.”
After the drill is over, participating agencies will spend weeks analyzing the results and looking for ways to improve their performance in the event that such a mass casualty incident occurs for real.
Officials from the Racine County Office of Emergency Management are helping to plan the drill, and they will be involved in gathering performance evaluations afterward.
Jay Kerner, the county’s emergency management director, said that such hands-on training is invaluable for firefighters and other emergency responders.
“We are every excited to see this exercise take place,” Kerner said.
Burlington Fire Department officials had been making plans for such a training drill before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Those plans were delayed for two years because of the disruptions created by the public health crisis.
Babe said he is pleased to see so many agencies coming together to test the region’s ability to manage a catastrophe with mass casualties. The exercise will simulate an incident so large that the Burlington department must reach out for assistance from several surrounding departments.
The Burlington Fire Department, which has two ambulances, took over emergency medical service in the city after the Burlington Rescue Squad ceased operations in 2019.
Saturday’s mock disaster drill will surpass both a Level 1 and Level 2 emergency, and will reach the Level 3 scenario in which Burlington resources are overwhelmed.
“We’re taking it all the way,” Babe said.
The simulation will involve a school bus and other vehicles involved in a horrific traffic crash that leaves numerous people injured and needing varied levels of medical attention.
Details of the scenario are tightly controlled — even among some organizers — so that the exercise tests participants in a when-seconds-count situation that is as realistic as possible.
As the mock disaster unfolds on Burlington’s 15-acre festival grounds at 681 Maryland Ave., other participating agencies will be staged at the city’s public works facility at 2200 S. Pine St. Each agency’s arrival at the simulated traffic crash will be planned to calculate the length of time needed if they were departing from their own hometown.
Babe and his fellow organizers have been planning the event for several months.
At least 75 emergency responders will be involved.
Biermann said it will be the first such disaster drill for his department in at least five years. Because of the intensive work needed to coordinate such an exercise, Biermann said, they are pretty rare.
“These types of training drills,” he said, “are just few and far between, unfortunately.”