Officials from the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service and 13 Maryland hospitals rehearsed their response to a mock terrorist attack Wednesday.
The exercise, called Capital Shield 2012, began at the Montgomery County Fire & Rescue Training Academy in Rockville, where about 30 volunteers wore body paint to simulate serious injuries. County EMS workers performed triage on-site, then sorted victims into four groups before transporting them to area hospitals.
Christina Crue, the exercise program manager at the University of Maryland’s Center for Health & Homeland Security, explained the scenario as a bomb attack at The Universities at Shady Grove. Hospital officials were involved in the planning of the exercise, but were not made aware of the details of the mock attack until they received victims.
The Center for Health & Homeland Security helped organize the event.
“Nobody wants to think about a mass casualty event happening in the region. We certainly need to be prepared for it,” Crue said. “These mass casualty incidents, they stretch us to the limit, not only fire and EMS but also the hospitals.”
Six mock victims were loaded onto one of the county’s mass casualty ambulance buses, strapped onto gurneys and driven to Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Montgomery General Hospital in Olney and Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park were the four other Montgomery County hospitals to receive patients via ambulance or helicopter.
At Shady Grove Adventist, the victims were taken through a decontamination tent outside the hospital’s emergency room entrance. Hospital workers wore hazmat suits and used portable computers to input victim’s information quickly.
“We set up the decontamination tents so the patients who showed up here and might have been exposed to some hazardous materials won’t contaminate the hospital,” Shady Grove Adventist Chief Financial Officer Daniel Cochran said. Cochran was the hospital administration on duty Wednesday. “It's really just a training exercise to go through the motions and in collaboration with all the hospitals in the region. We actually are in constant communication with all the hospitals.”
Shady Grove set up a mock command center in a conference room to organize its response and trade information with other hospitals. Because a mass casualty attack would likely mean a surge of patients, hospital officials discussed patient transfers.
“We try to go through all those things as we're doing the drill and as far as I've seen today, everything was run very well,” Cochran said.
Officials said the exercise did not impact actual patients at hospitals. Staff from the Center for Health & Homeland Security evaluated the response.
“Obviously we try to go through all those things that might not have gone as well to improve on that going forward,” Cochran said.
akraut@gazette.net
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