Archive: Around Town

As a Delta flight to Detroit took off on Runway 32 late Saturday morning passengers on the right hand side of the plane could see another 50-seat Bombardier CRJ Series aircraft on the ground, surrounded by fire trucks and ambulances, with passengers being carried out on stretchers and firefighters scrambling to help victims of the crash.  Of the 42 souls below, 8 were deceased on impact, 8 had serious injuries requiring immediate medical care, 11 had less serious injuries, and 15 escaped with only minor cuts and bruises.  Oddly the plane had no cockpit or wings.  That was because the CRJ on the ground was a simulator being used for a full scale disaster drill, not a real crashed plane at all.

"I like the full scale part of it," says Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport Operations Supervisor and Fire Chief Dave Crawford.  "Everybody is practicing in actual real time.  You can practice, but usually it's in sub-sections.  You practice fighting fires, your response, you practice with the equipment. But this is nice because it all comes together, and we get to practice with all our mutual aid departments at the same time."



FEMA defines five levels of preparedness activities, starting with orientation seminars for emergency responders, low level drills and tests, tabletop exercises, functional exercises and full-scale exercises.  The Full-scale exercise is required by the FAA every 36 months, and it must include a full-scale airport emergency staged as close to a real disaster as possible.  In Ithaca, an incident involving the largest plane, the 50-seat CRJ, is a four-alarm emergency.  A first alarm might involve one to seven passengers.

"That's just Lansing and us," Crawford says.  "A second alarm is eight to fifteen passengers, and so on.  Once we're up to 50 we have a fourth alarm and everybody's coming."

Around 8am on the morning of the drill volunteers gathered at the airport administrative building to be made up with theatrical latex wounds including burned hands, guts, and various cuts and contusions.  Airport firefighter Tom Warner applied stage blood from a 5 gallon container, using a small paint brush.  Walking wounded mingled with the dead and more seriously wounded, telling jokes and eating bagels.


After a group picture was snapped, the victims boarded vans to be transported to the crash site.  The largest aircraft Ithaca-Tompkins Regional Airport serves is a 50-passenger CRJ, with two pilots and a flight attendent, for a total of 53.  Passengers were loaded into a fuselage simulator, made of enormous fuel drums.

"We have seating for 35," Crawford explains.  "Typically in an airplane crash you're going to have some people that are mobile.  When the first responders open that main door those people are typically ready to come out.  So we put 35 in the seats and the rest are standing, ready to come out.  That's how we get 50 in there."

Once the door was closed a theatrical smoke machine filled the fuselage, and a car, several hundred feet away was set on fire.  That allowed the emergency responders to practice putting out a real fire without putting the volunteers in danger.

The first fire trucks on the scene cover the plane with foam designed to suppress fuel fires.

Tompkins-Ithaca Regional Airport maintains its own fire department that includes ten firefighters, all of whom have EMT training as well.  They staff the department from 5am until midnight every day.  Because they are on-sight, they were the first responders Saturday morning.  The first two fire trucks barreled onto the scene, spraying Class B foam (used for fuel fires) onto the car.  Without slowing down they continued to the fuselage and covered it with foam as well.

The first responders approach the plane carefully, taking out a severely wounded man to clear the way for extracting passengers, who are screaming in fright and pain. After hosing the interior of the plane they begin guiding passengers out... those who can walk, at least.

Assessing the scene, airport firefighters opened the aircraft door, where they were met with a very dead looking crash dummy.  They unfurled a fire hose, and sprayed the interior of the plane, then quickly began guiding the passengers who could walk off of the plane, while some of those who needed help walking were helped by the luckier passengers.  After determining it was safe, a firefighter opened the windows, allowing smoke to billow out.

Meanwhile the 911 center was called to dispatch fire departments that normally respond to severe airport emergencies.  A code word is used to differentiate between drills and real emergencies, and if a department is needed for a real emergency during the drill the emergency response center switches them away from the drill.  Responders from the Lansing Fire Department (the airport is in the Village of Lansing), Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, Dryden, Varna, Fire and Rescue, and at least three Bangs ambulances showed up Saturday.  If there were a real disaster emergency responders would come from as far as Trumansburg to help out.

Firefighters set up three tarpaulins at a distance from the crash.  Passengers with minor injuries were gathered on the green tarp, while those who needed medical help were sent to the yellow.  The most critically injured, needing immediate help were carried on stretchers to a red tarp, where they were treated immediately by EMTs.  Red patients were taken to ambulances before any of the others.

Crawford says that statistics determine how many dead, critical, middle injuries or walking wounded are designated.  The drill uses those proportions to determine how many volunteers fall into each category.

The jovial atmosphere from the makeup room was gone.  Volunteers had been briefed on how their simulated injuries would hurt, and they tried to respond to EMTs as realistically as possible.

"The theater people... they really ham it up," Crawford says.  "But we've had some college kids ham it up, too.  We just explain to them what we expect.  We say this is what your injuries are, so think about how much pain there would be."

Extrication of passengers and triage are the first major tasks.  The blood and guts play a key role in the drill.  Crawford says they are used to evaluate each passenger as they are assigned a care designation and directed to the tarps.

The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) dictates that the dead are left in place, except where they are in the way of rescuing a live person.  keeping them in place helps NTSB inspectors determine the circumstances of the crash.  In the drill that meant the dead didn't have much to do once the triage portion of the exercise was done.  David Craig or Newfield decided that as long as he was dead he would become a zombie, well away from where actual drill activity was still going on.  But on the tarps and in the ambulances it was all business.

The dead had the least to do during the drill. David Craig or Newfield decided that as long as he was dead he might as well become a zombie.

A dead woman walked over to the red tarp to watch over her seat-mate, in critical condition and being treated by Lansing responders Dan Ferguson and Kim Sweeney.  They continually asked him questions to evaluate how cognizant the passenger was of what was happening to him, and asked his help in applying pressure to a stomach wound, so serious that his intestines spilled out, to contain the bleeding.


Rochester Airport Fire Chief Todd Bane came to Ithaca to evaluate the firefighter response, while Ithaca Airport Emergency Responder Tom Warner evaluated the EMT side, walking from the fuselage to the ambulances and triage sites, taking notes on clipboards.

About an hour and a half to two hours after the drill began the dead and wounded were back at the airport fire station eating pizza and -- ironically -- wings.

The airport remained open during Saturday's drill.  Several planes took off on Runway 32 in the course of the morning, including that Delta flight on the model of plane the drill simulated.  While the airport fire engines come across the field to the training site, fire trucks from neighboring fire departments enter through back gates, insuring runways and taxiways were free for takeoffs and landings.  In a real emergency they would come to the main gate near the Airport Administration Building, which also includes the on-site fire station, and they would be routed across the airport to the scene of the accident.


Crawford says that the responders' performance during the drill will now be evaluated for portions that went well, and others that can be improved.

"During the full scale drill we'll find faults or shortcomings," he says.  "We work on them and review our progress at those table-top reviews."

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