School Bus MCI Drill

10 minutes later, the Ouray Ambulance, Ridgway VFD, another OC EMS ALS QRV and Squad 11 will arrive on scene.

5 minutes later, additional LE officers will arrive on scene, as well as EMTs and LE rangers from Ridgway State Park, if they are interested in participating. (This would also be when the OC SO's Command & Communications van would arrive on scene and be set up, if that is written into the drill.) Additionally, a Montrose FD ambulance responding from Station 2 and the first units of the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team (OMRT) will arrive on scene.

5 minutes later Squad 11, Ouray's back-up ambulance, Telluride Fire & Rescue Placerville Ambulance, and the rest of the OMRT members will arrive.

3 minutes later, the first group of parents/guardians start to arrive and will continue to arrive in approximately 5-minute increments, interspersed with arriving emergency responders so they are not arriving on scene simultaneously. This will continue every 5-10 minutes until all 60-70 role-playing agitated and concerned relatives arrive on scene.

5 minutes later, Silverton EMS and a CSP unit(s) will arrive on scene.

10 minutes later, Telluride Fire & EMS ambulance and Norwood Fire & EMS ambulance will arrive on scene.

(Silverton EMS, Montrose FD, Telluride Fire & EMS, Norwood Fire & EMS and other selected agencies will be invited to have additional members attend to act as observers and participate in the after-action debriefing process.)

Once the bus been properly stabilized by Squad 11 and members of Log Hill and Ridgway VFDs, the remaining victims will be placed in the bus, if the plan to use manikins turns out not to be a viable option.

Patients will have to be triaged, initial treatment started as practical, extricated from the bus, packaged and transported up the hillside for re-triage, treatment and transportation to either Montrose Memorial Hospital (to serve as an external disaster/MCI drill) or to the Mountain Medical Clinic.

LE could also continue the FTX by interviewing the bus driver, accident scene investigation, etc. if they so desire. This would be up to the Ouray County sheriff and Montrose CSP accident investigation team.

A school bus will go to each location to retrieve student victims and bring them back to the County Land Use Office for debriefing, accounting and release.

POSSIBLE BONUS TRAINING AND RESOURCES

Ridgway School District Transportation Supervisor Maggie Graff has proposed getting the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) and/or the National Association of Pupil Transportation (NAPT) to fund a school bus seat belt study as part of this FTX. The proposal is to fund placing seat belts in every other seat on the school bus, obtain 30 pediatric-sized manikins, 15 to be seat-belted and 15 to be unbelted, and mount several cameras in the bus to film the action as the bus is pushed/rolled down the embankment.

Film footage would be made available to C-DOT, CSP and OC EMS for training and educational purposes. Additionally, the group that funds this program would provide a point of contact and a way for nonprofit groups like the National Association of EMTs (NAEMT) to obtain a copy of the footage for training EMS workers on what kinds of injury patterns to expect with this kind of accident.

If this is possible, it is hoped that this in turn will make us eligible for funding from the Tri-County Seat Belt Coalition and/or the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, C-DOT, to offset some of the FTX expenses.

STAGING

As mentioned previously, all participating units will be staged at the Ouray County Land Use Office and, for real response time increments, be held there until sent to the scene to stage and transport. Due to the nature of the two-lane road, staging will be of critical importance for the arriving units.

Several areas should be designated for different types of responding units, such as LE, fire suppression, vehicle extrication, ambulances, Mountain Rescue, etc. Drivers will either need to stay by their vehicles or leave the keys in the vehicles in case they need to be moved. In turn, this adds the need for staging area security so no one can walk in and pillage the vehicles while everyone is focused on the emergency response. This is an area that will need to be trained by chief officers and incident commanders and then put into practice at a TTX to be scheduled in March or April.