Pueblo fire chiefs conduct mass casualty exercise near airport to prepare for future disasters
Pueblo first responder agencies conducted their first annual mass casualty incident exercise Wednesday since the completion of munitions destruction at the Pueblo Chemical Depot.
Prior to this year, the Pueblo Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) conducted similar exercises in conjunction with Pueblo County first responder agencies.
Now, Pueblo County fire chiefs are continuing the tradition on their own.
This year's exercise involved a simulated runway collision involving a crop duster carrying two souls and a larger passenger plane carrying 50 at Pueblo Memorial Airport.
Pueblo County fire agencies responded to the simulated crash, dealing with mock hazards such as the threat of insecticide in the air from the crop duster, issuing a short mock shelter-in-place for Baxter Learning Center, and performing triage, decontamination, and transportation for the simulated victims. Local hospitals also participated, providing "treatment" to the simulated victims.
The exercise provides an opportunity for agencies to work together and ensure they are on the same page in the case of a real mass casualty incident or other large incident requiring multiple agencies to respond.
"We always want to have our mutual aid working together," said Tim Trujillo, a spokesperson for the Pueblo Fire Department. "CSEPP was a wonderful opportunity, but now that we no longer have the Pueblo Chemical Depot to lead that effort, our fire chiefs have come together to lead those drills themselves."
Last November, a freight train carrying coal derailed due to a broken rail, the National Transportation Safety Board stated in their preliminary report on the incident.
The night of the derailment, Colorado State Patrol Spokesperson Maj. Brian Lyons observed that Pueblo first responders "continually practice and train here in Pueblo County with our emergency management partners just to look at these so that when we have these incidents, we have the resources available to handle something of this magnitude."
Along with providing a chance to work with other agencies, the exercise provided the Pueblo Fire Department with the chance to test a new type of medical communications technology.
Cara McCoy, a customer success manager for the medical communications and logistics company Pulsara, stated that the Pueblo Fire Department used the exercise to test-run Pulsara for daily use. The program provides an app to connect crews in the field with staff at a local hospital, relaying relevant medical information directly to the doctors at the hospital through a "patient channel," McCoy said.
"If you look at traditional healthcare communication, it's very fragmented, outdated technology — it's a lot of phone calls, radios, pagers, faxes, all to communicate around one patient," she said.
"What you end up with is playing a game of telephone where the message is never the same by the time it reaches the last person in line. With Pulsara, the crews in the field can plug in patient information and send that to the hospital, and then the hospital can receive that information and activate their downstream teams so they're all in the app communicating in the same space around a patient."
McCoy stated that the Pueblo West, Pueblo Rural, Beulah, and Rye fire departments are all actively using Pulsara to communicate every day.
"We just got Pueblo city fire on board for this drill, but they plan to use it every day itself, and hopefully we'll get AMR on board shortly," McCoy said.
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This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Large emergency incident response near Pueblo airport is only a drill
