| Volunteers
sought for disaster drill
Your emergency responders are working hard to prepare for events that will hopefully never happen. On May 12th there will be 11 different agencies training in Cottonwood along with numerous volunteers in an effort to increase our interoperability and our preparedness. The event will be a Mass Casualty event, to be held at the Idaho County Fair Grounds on King Street in Cottonwood. Agencies involved will be: Cottonwood Police Department and Fire Department, St. Mary’s and Syringa hospitals and ambulances, Idaho County Sheriff’s office and Idaho State Police, Bureau of Homeland Security, Regional Public Health Department, Idaho State Communications, North Idaho Correctional Institute, as well as volunteers from Prairie School District #242 and the local Senior Citizens. The event will begin with an incident at Idaho County Fair Grounds. Idaho County Sheriffs Office will dispatch law enforcement, medical, and fire to the scene to deal with the incident. NICI and Idaho County Sheriffs office with assistance from Idaho State Police will search the area and secure the incident. Then the fire and EMS folks will step in and begin assessing the patients and dealing with any situations that may arise. From there, the EMS folks will determine where the multiple patients will need to be sent, in coordination with State Communications and Public Health, who will provide a bed count at all hospitals while State Communications will begin notifying regional hospitals, air medical facilities and other entities as needed. All of this will be done in a coordinated effort in order to support the local agencies accomplishing their mission of stabilizing the situation and helping the patients. What we need are volunteers. We would like to have 20-30 volunteer patients who would be willing to assist us by being role players. We also need as many ‘concerned relatives’ as we can get to go to the hospital and be role players. They would simulate the friends and relatives who would normally go to the hospital when a friend is hurt. This will be done in an effort to as closely simulate reality as we can in order to prepare the two hospitals for the influx of concerned relatives and friends that would normally occur. So, why do all this? Yearly we run mass casualty drills in the area to test the hospitals. Last year the hospital asked that we run a drill that would test the capabilities of the hospital both with patients and with concerned citizens at the front door. The dual event is to test the interoperability with multiple agencies that would logically work together. We have held one meeting so far, and from the feedback from that meeting I am confident that all will work well and everyone will learn from the event. Now, we need you. If you would be willing to spend part of your Saturday to help improve your community please call Terry Cochran at 962-3231 with your name and phone number and I will explain where we would need you and on what day. Any age can help out, from 0-100, as logically any age would be involved. Get involved, help the folks who will be helping you so that they may learn and improve. Thank You Terry S. Cochran |
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