Maury County Incident Commander shares how recent training helped in storm response
MAURY COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) — Maury County was one of the hardest hit counties during the tornado outbreak in Middle Tennessee last week.
The Maury County Fire Department was one of the lead agencies handling the disaster.
Incident Commander Luke Greenwell told News 2, the initial moments were almost overwhelming. But the fact that his agency trained for this exact scenario helped first responders remain calm and systematically search for victims.
“I transmitted we had a major emergency with multiple structures collapsed,” MCFD Division Chief Greenwell said.
8 confirmed tornadoes May 8-9 in Middle Tennessee
“There are so many trees down I could not see the other side of the road,” Greenwell said, describing the initial moments when he arrived on scene. “It’s still overwhelming when I got up there, I didn’t say anything on the radio for a minute, I gathered my thoughts, what I was going to report back because what I am about to say over the radio will key up the rest of the county and surrounding agencies.”
According to Greenwell, weeks ago, 50 members of Maury County Fire practiced for this exact scenario. “I wrote a standard operating guideline, essentially a playbook, for how we are going to handle this. I had dummies placed all throughout our training center, I had concrete rubble on top of some of them. and we played exactly to this scenario even this is powerlines you can’t go this way, and going out finding them and marking the buildings properly, so we know that has been searched.”
Greenwell said the realistic practice allowed his team to stay calm and focus on the task at hand.
“I think it calmed everyone down a little bit and honestly, if we had not trained on it, some of our most critical decisions were made by members who went to the training. and I felt if we didn’t train on this, had we not written the guidelines before, we would have been playing pick-up basketball, we would not have planned, we would not be prepared.”
⏩ Read today’s top stories on wkrn.com
Greenwell continued, “We gridded off the incident and had crews go out being responsible for searching a certain area report what they found, and conduct search and rescue operations
and I actually went out in the field with our crews and we did a whole secondary search of the entire area making sure we didn’t miss anyone and that was my biggest fear the whole time in command that we have someone injured somewhere that we didn’t find, and I wanted to make sure we went out and did this very detailed again. And we worked all night through the weather, it got really rough for a while but the whole time I was thinking if I was laying or my family was laying out there, I want them coming through the rain. I don’t want them sheltering back or anything like that.”
The damage is still being assessed but one person died in Maury County and dozens of homes were destroyed.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WKRN News 2.
