Photos and files from Jamie Lyle. Just after 9:30am Tuesday all hell broke loose for the city’s Emergency Management Team as they reacted to a major emergency unfolding at the Airport.
Just after 9:30am Tuesday all hell broke loose for the city’s Emergency Management Team as they reacted to a major emergency unfolding at the Airport. Crews were called out to a mid air collision between a dash 8 and a helicopter.
Airport manager Jack Santerre says the airport is mandated to test their policy and procedures in place for just such and event.
“Under regulations for airport operators we are obliged to test our emergency procedures every four years,” he explains to members of the media in preparation for the event.
“The scenarios we develop are within house and are to (sort of) maximise on the various activities that happen at an airport and what could potentially happen in a worse case scenario.”
“The nature of the disaster is an aircraft crash on Airport (road) and we will be testing the airport emergency procedures also along with the fire, police, the city and hospital emergency procedures in response to that type of disaster.”
Santerre also adds that in planning the scenarios involving all emergency services is nothing new as they take into consideration all the assets that are in a municipality to make them work in such an event. He also notes that the addition of Canadore College students was an excellent fit.
“We’re looking for the various flaws that could be in our plan and from the exercise we look at all the responding agencies and their feedback and then we look at addressing any of those flaws and writing new procedures to deal with them.”
“Canadore was a great opportunity this year. They’re offering for the first time an Airport Operations Program for the cadets and part of their training process was a number of activities with the airport and it just happen to be a great fit.”
“It’s an ongoing process, on a yearly basis we look at our procedures we evaluate our procedures every year we do table top exercises every year other than the one that we do live ones, so we are always ready,” he says.
“The planning for this took place in connection with the training program with the college and we looked at it and saying this is a great opportunity we have available to the cadets to work with the program, they’re looking at a training experience it works well for our people because of the nature of the event.”
The National Air cadet students acted as the cadavers, or mock victims in this situation and pulled out all the stops to play the role complete with costume, gory makeup applications featuring blood, cuts and burns wounds to simulate injuries that can be sustained in an air crash.
"I'm in Drama class but this is the best drama that I have ever been in because it's actual drama. I'm one of the fortunate actors that just has chest pains but I'm still walking around taking care of people. Honest to God, this has made my summer,” states Evan Vatri, Air Cadet and Drama student on his role as crash victim.
"This is Airport Operations. It's a national course through the cadet program. I've met a bunch of people (from) everywhere."
When asked which students were attending the mock situation and what kind of benefits they were gaining out the experience Captain John Harris, Regional Cadet Public Affairs Officer, CFB 40 says it is putting theory into practice.
"These are all air cadets from across Canada taking the events and aviation technology courses that the air cadet training academy offers."
"What they're having to do today is to personify and experience some of their classroom lessons. They’ve been learning a lot of airport operations over the summer; security, emergency procedures air side operations, aircraft support. So what they've had an opportunity to do today by being simulated casualties is to actually live some of the emergency procedures that would be put in following an air disaster.”
With a 13 minute emergency response time Joe Brazeau, a teacher for Canadore College assisting students in shadowing some of the emergency response teams, says it is something that gives him concern.
"In my opinion, it was a little bit lengthy but I'm not sure exactly what the expectation was. I think it's a good thing that we try this sort of thing out once in a while to keep practice going so we can shave some off of the response time and do a better job"
He agreed that the whole event is a great learning process for everyone.
"Correct. Everybody has their way of approaching business and perhaps we have new people and not just our group and maybe some services (also) do and there learning too."
