It was a harrowing scene at the Cameron McIntosh Airport on Friday morning.
Emergency crews from fire, EMS and the RCMP were on scene responding to a plane crash near the runway.
There were eight casualties reported. Three were taken by ambulance to hospital and others were treated on the scene. Meanwhile, firefighters had to douse a fire near the runway.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a real accident.
It was a mock accident, a live exercise mandated by Transport Canada and held every four years to test the abilities of emergency personnel to respond to major air disasters in a timely fashion.
According to director of operations Stewart Schafer, it’s “extremely important that we do these things.”
“Each department — EMS, the fire department and police — also do their own training, but this is where we’re bringing them all together as one group to see how well they work together, and we try to identify where the problems are and rectify them in case we do have a real accident.”
The scenario for the exercise was of a plane that came in for a landing, but blew a tire, went off and crashed on the side of the runway.
An old airplane was placed on the side of the runway and a flash pan was used for the fire. Initially, they had trouble getting the fire started because of the cold conditions, but eventually got it going.
The accident was called in, and crews responded within minutes to the scene. The fire department doused the fire and EMS crews were there to treat and transport the victims to “hospital,” which in this case was the fire training grounds. Meanwhile, the RCMP cordoned off the road and runways to incoming traffic.
The idea was to simulate a real accident as closely as possible, and to identify any mistakes or miscues so those can be addressed before a real situation happens. A full debriefing of personnel took place back inside the air terminal once the exercise was completed.
“We’ll still have to work on this and make sure the next one works better, and continue on with it,” said Schafer.
While the hope is emergency crews will never need to respond to air crashes at the airport, the reality is that Cameron McIntosh Airport has seen a similar disaster take place before in recent years.
Two people from the Yukon were killed when a floatplane crashed not far from the airport’s runway in 2013, shortly after takeoff from a nearby waterway.
“That’s why we do the training,” Schafer said, in case a real emergency happens.
The details of the exercise were kept secret. Only the commanders of the various emergency services — North Battleford fire, WPD ambulance and the RCMP — knew in advance about it, so when the exercise took place they could gauge the response of their personnel.
Even the mock accident “victims” — students with North Battleford Comprehensive High School’s drama department — were kept in the dark about most of the details. The drama club teacher was told about it only a couple of days in advance.
The students wore makeup to simulate their injuries, which included a broken femur, head injuries, a punctured lung, blunt force trauma, heart attack symptoms and even anxiety attacks.
For each of them, simulating their injuries posed different challenges.
“It just depends on what injury you had,” said Tegan Schafer, (Stewart Schafer’s daughter), who was one of the participants. “For me, my broken arm was kind of easy. You kind of hold it, and be like ‘ahh, I’m in pain!’”
But for the performer simulating the brain injury, “that might have been a little difficult,” she said.
The students said they hoped that by taking part in the exercise, emergency personnel would be better experienced to handle real situations involving victims in need of assistance.
