Prom-Week Mock Crash Exercise

I mentioned in the last post that I had the opportunity to take part in a mock-crash exercise for the local high school. This was a fun project and from our perspective was another opportunity to work with others within the community. Involved besides AmCare EMS was St. Albans City PD, St. Albans City FD, and St. Albans Town Heavy Rescue. Many other individuals and organizations donated time and materials. Did we make a positive impact on our target audience? It's hard to know for sure, but the reaction seemed positive.

This was the first time I have participated in something like this. I have been involved in a couple very large scale MCI drills/trainings, but their focus was more on learning to work with multiple agencies at a large scale event. The mock-crash we did on Tuesday was not really training-based at all. The goal was to accurately simulate the look and feel of a bad car wreck involving kids, alcohol, and fatality. Knowing this going in I was unprepared to find out that it felt almost exactly like working a real call. A lot was going on and we had only choreographed this thing to a very general point. Kinda cool to see that with very little guidance, all these 1st Responders managed to work together to make it seem like the real thing.





We are up close and personal at bad wrecks as a part of our jobs. We have seen the consequences up close and personally, whereas the general public may only pass a scene on the road or read about it in the paper. I hope this event helped at least some of these young adults realize that their actions can and often do have a large impact on others.

Special thanks to Ronnie Robtoy for the photos. Ron also shot video of the event, and I hope to have time soon to create a short movie that interested readers of WayOutEMS can access from this site.