First responders across Lewis County were invited to a mass casualty incident training exercise hosted at the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds on Saturday.
According to the county’s Deputy Director of Emergency Management Ross McDowell, the event saw a good response from EMTs, firefighters and law enforcement.
“I like how they did it,” he said. “The first two hours were spent training on the plan, then they walked you through the plan itself, physically walked you through.”
Put on by Riverside Fire Authority, the event also included students from Civil Air Patrol and Centralia’s Theater of Arts Discipline who acted as deceased or injured patients.
Shay Goff, a senior emergency services instructor for Lewis County a firefighter/paramedic for Riverside Fire Authority was the lead educator for Saturday’s event. He said right before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a committee was formed to create a countywide mass casualty incident plan that came out to 81 pages. Though firesponders from Pe Ell to Packwood have been trained on the plan through online modules, Goff said Saturday’s event was the first joint effort to practice as a group in person.
About 110 people attended. Riverside planned for about 150. With a chuckle, Goff blamed the Mariners making the playoffs as a likely cause behind lower-than-expected attendance.
“This is our first time implementing the plan and getting it out to the masses,” he said, adding later, “The only way we can really get everybody on the same page is to have that in-person training. Our hope is that we’ll be able to do this more in the future.”
The plan includes three levels of incidents, with level one including up to seven people injured, Goff said, level two having between seven and 12 patients and a level three incident being anything with more than 13 injured.
“(The plan includes) any incident that overwhelms your emergency response. You could have one with 10 or with 50 people, it just overwhelms whatever you can’t handle with your own local resources,” McDowell said.
Level two or three incidents, Goff said, would likely require calling for out-of-county help.
The training itself was on an incident with 13 patients. After studying the plan, crews used the fairgrounds as an incident command area, breaking teams up into staging, triage, transport, incident command and other jobs. The injured were then identified into color categories: red, meaning severely injured and requiring immediate attention; yellow for moderate injuries that need attention soon; green indicating slight injuries on a responsive patient who can still walk; gray, where a patient is likely to die soon; and black, signaling they are deceased.
McDowell said triage teams identify patients by color and move them to ambulances in order of red, yellow and green while gray and black are not moved. The Lewis County Coroner was also a part of the exercise for this purpose.
Goff said Riverside is the leading agency for fire and rescue in the county as it receives the most calls and resources, thus it was leading the charge on Saturday’s training.
“It was a joint effort through DEM (emergency management). Erika Katt (DEM planner) was the individual who was able to put the actors in place. She went through that group and some Civil Air Patrol. Couldn’t have done it without them,” Goff said, adding later, “I hope everybody got a lot out of it.”
