MORGANTOWN — When people count on you to run into harm’s way to aid the fallen or neutralize the threat, even practice is serious business.
And that’s what took place Thursday as the Morgantown Municipal Airport conducted a triennial exercise, a large-scale training scenario to test its Airport Emergency Plan.
Morgantown Police and Fire, the MGW staff and fire personnel, MECCA, Mon County Emergency Management Agency, the TSA, J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital, and others gathered near the airport’s new T-hangars to simulate the worst.
Volunteer crisis actors scattered near the site of a downed plane were triaged and evacuated by first responders. Nearby, a downed helicopter burned as the MPD searched for an active shooter with MECCA’s drones circling overhead.
“We do this every three years as a federal requirement. In the off years, it’s a tabletop exercise,” Airport Director Jonathan Vrabel said. “We’ll have a meeting, probably next month, where we’ll do a full debrief and discuss how everything went. We’ll take a look at what we need to improve upon — what we did well and what we didn’t do so well.”
Training equipment that simulated burning and crashed aircraft aided to the realism of the scenario, which wasn’t contained to the airport.
“Victims” were loaded into ambulances and taken to Ruby Memorial Hospital.
“Our part of today’s exercise was to test our ability to triage the ‘patients’ from the exercise through our Emergency Department and into various parts of the hospital, while making the appropriate adjustments for staffing and bed availability, and still treating the patients who were already in the hospital at the time of the event,” a WVU Medicine spokesperson said.
TWEET @DominionPostWV
