CARIBOU, Maine – The sounds of children screaming out in pain, their dazed voices sounding confused as adults rushed around to assess the situation, greeted first responders as they arrived on scene at Caribou High School. A school bus full of kids had just been involved in a car accident with two cars, with an unknown number of injured and dead among the crash victims.
While this harrowing scene may sound like it is straight out of a school administrator’s nightmare, it was all part of a carefully coordinated mock mass casualty incident designed to test the school’s emergency protocols while working in partnership with first responders and staff at Cary Medical Center.
“The hope was to try to engage community partners to make this a worthwhile event for everyone and learn from it,” RSU 39 School Safety Specialist Travis Barnes said. “We practice with our bus drivers, like they practice their evacuation drills with their kids on the bus and safety procedures all the time. But this is a bigger scale for us.”
Many of the RSU’s bus drivers watched from nearby as their colleagues worked through the scenario by assessing passengers and working with the wounded.
“We hope we never have to use it,” Barnes said. “But hopefully if we do, we can fall back on this event.”
More than a dozen students volunteered to portray passengers with a wide range of injuries. Volunteers helped make the drill more realistic by using make-up and prosthetics to mimic cuts, abrasions and bruises that ranged from minor to life-threatening. Police officers with Caribou Police Department and EMS personnel from Caribou Fire and Ambulance called to the scene worked to secure the area, triage the injured, and transport patients to Cary Medical Center.
As the ambulances rolled onto the Cary campus, dozens of hospital staff engaged in the training, each playing a crucial role to care for the injured and comfort their families as they arrived looking for their loved ones. Chief Nursing Officer Jennifer Plant said the hospital rarely handles mass casualty incidents, so trainings like this help to ensure everyone knows what their job is in the event a real one occurs.
“We don’t do them very often, so people get nervous. They’re not sure exactly where do I go? How do I help out? Other non-clinical departments might wonder, where do I report?,” Plant said. “So, the more that we train for it, the more comfortable people will feel, and we will get things to people more efficiently.”
With an emergency department already full from an earlier accident and patients seeking a variety of care, the drill tested the capacity of staff at the hospital to handle an influx of patients with a host of medical issues. Plant says this is one of the major challenges a hospital faces in a large-scale incident like this, because the patients already being seen cannot be abandoned to care for the victims of the accident.
”Just because we have an MCI doesn’t mean the rest of the hospital shuts down. We still have to maintain everyone else’s safety that we have at the same time,” Plant said.
At the end of the day, this exercise was just a drill, but the lessons learned will pay dividends in the event a real mass casualty incident occurs in the future.
“The purpose of having these trainings is to find areas that we can improve,” Plant said. “If it improves our communication when it happens, if it cuts down on any wait time, and if it gets people to where they need to be quicker, then all the better for when it actually really happens.”
Travis Barnes says bringing together the city’s resources, along with assistance from officials from Aroostook Emergency Management Agency who helped with planning and coordination, not only builds capacity, but strengthens relationships between local agencies, the school and the hospital.
“This event is something that we can take pride in as a city,” Barnes said. “We met and planned through this and now we know what we can do together, and we know what we can do for the community and the city.”
Cary Medical Center is a 63-bed acute care hospital well known for its patient-centered services. We are a community of providers committed to excellence in healthcare and to improving the lives of those we serve. We are actively engaged in advancing the health and wellness needs of people in Aroostook County, including the unserved and underserved. Cary Medical Center and Pines Health Services are equal opportunity providers and employers.
