Drill highlights emergency preparedness at Palm Springs airport

First responders were rushing to Palm Springs International Airport Wednesday morning, as part of an emergency drill simulating a major plane crash with multiple casualties.

A chaotic scene at the runway as victims of a major plane crash are being treated in a triage area…

The casualties numerous, multiple deaths, and the sense of panic consuming the injured. Victims suffering from minor injuries to major lacerations, burns, and even lost limbs.

While the scene was gruesome and upsetting, it’s a realistic emergency preparedness drill being conducted by the airport, in coordination with police and various fire agencies. The emotions of the victims testing their response. In the mock drill simulation, there were 22 victims, six of them “dead”.

“Who are the walking wounded,” Tom Nolan, Palm Springs Airport Director, said. “Who are the more terminally wounded and perhaps those that are deceased as well.”

{“url”:”https://twitter.com/JeremyChenKESQ/status/996810593456668672″,”author_name”:”Jeremy Chen”,”author_url”:”https://twitter.com/JeremyChenKESQ”,”html”:”&#lt;blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”&#gt;&#lt;p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”&#gt;Emergency preparedness drill underway at the &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/PalmSprings?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;#PalmSprings&#lt;/a&#gt; Airport. Crews responding in minutes of a “crashed” airplane. &#lt;a href=”https://t.co/wS7Dtqok5B”&#gt;pic.twitter.com/wS7Dtqok5B&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/p&#gt;– Jeremy Chen (@JeremyChenKESQ) &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/JeremyChenKESQ/status/996810593456668672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;May 16, 2018&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/blockquote&#gt;n&#lt;script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″&#gt;&#lt;/script&#gt;n”,”width”:550,”height”:null,”type”:”rich”,”cache_age”:”3153600000″,”provider_name”:”Twitter”,”provider_url”:”https://twitter.com”,”version”:”1.0″}

He said the drill is done every three years as mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. He said in his 11-year tenure as director, his staff has fortunately never had to deal with a major commercial plane crash. However, Nolan says they must stay prepared nonetheless.

“It really reminds us that any day, any time we got to be prepared,” he said.

With first responders dousing the plane fuselage within minutes and agencies working to get victims help, Nolan said the exercise provides invaluable experience to continue keeping airport prepared.

So we are going behind closed doors,” he said. “We’re going to dissect what we did good and maybe what we didn’t do as good and we’re going to continue to work on that..”

Nolan said in addition to the live drill, staff also tested their equipment and vehicles to ensure rapid response in separate drills.