Published: November 03, 2009 12:07 am      

CITY OF TONAWANDA: First responders converge on Spaulding Fibre for training

Three piles of concrete, mangled cars and simulated wounded littered the landscape at the former Spaulding Fibre site Monday as the first day of Vigilant Guard rescue exercises got under way.

The week-long event will mimic disaster conditions to train National Guardsmen and first responders from New York, other states, Canada, Denmark and the United Kingdom. While some of those training have never seen anything like the disaster they’re practicing, others have seen much worse. John Cronin, a squad leader for the Suffolk County Urban Search and Rescue Team, worked at Ground Zero after Sept. 11, 2001, and said his group was using the same techniques and same tools they used during that real-life emergency.

“This is as close as I’ve come to seeing that type of situation in a drill,” Cronin said.

Brigadier Gen. Michael Swezey, commander of the National Guard’s Joint Task Force 6 based in Buffalo, said the exercise developed out of the lessons learned, and mistakes made, while responding to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and fallout from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. University at Buffalo professor Bob Jacobi said this scenario, a 5.9 earthquake rippling out from Kenmore, might seem far-fetched to some, but is more plausible than people think. In the last 20 years, the professor said his colleagues have found hundreds of geological faults in the area’s landscape. Just more than a decade ago, a small earthquake rocked the intersection of Delaware Avenue and Sheridan Drive, very near the point being used for the simulation.

Erie County Executive Chris Collins said it’s especially appropriate that the exercise is being held locally, with the crash of Flight 3407 and floods in the Southern Tier still fresh in the public memory.

“It seems as though Erie County has had one emergency after another after another, because it has,” Collins said.

Tonya Quarles is one of the local people who signed on to serve as a simulated victim. Lying on the side of a rubble pile with a prosthetic arm wound — complete with plastic skin laid open to the bone and a hand-held pump that makes the wound ooze fake blood — Quarles said she picked up on the opportunity through word of mouth. When asked if she had any acting experience that would help her to scream in pain, she laughed.

“Yeah. Life,” she said with a wry smile.

Those going into the other nearby structures had plenty of noisy hydraulic and pneumatic tools to make their points of entry safe. And even though it’s just a drill, Cronin said his people were very aware that falling concrete doesn’t differentiate between training and real rescues if mistakes are made.

“This activity is very real,” Cronin said. “The way the pile is set up, if we move the wrong piece of concrete, if we don’t shore it right, we could cause another collapse.”

While the victims inside the two more involved structures aren’t real, the people trying to rescue them are. Any type of collapse during training could result in real injuries for the trainees, and that’s why medics from the City of Tonawanda fire department will be on hand all week. Firefighter Michael Lamp said twisted ankles were the worst of the injuries he’d seen through 2:30 p.m. on day one, but despite all the precautions he predicted more bumps and scrapes to come.

“I’m sure as they get deeper into the pile more injuries will occur,” Lamp said.

Observing the group from the 105th Military Police Company preparing for its role in decontaminating survivors from Quarles’ group, Lt. Col. Paul Fanning of the New York National Guard said in order to train realistically the group had to arrive and set up state-of-the-art tents used to quickly clean and patch the wounded for transport to hospitals. The one big difference is the pace.

“It’s set up to be realistic, but in a drill people are more meticulous, more safety conscious,” Fanning said.

The first bunch carefully donned Hazmat suits to enter the pile and extract survivors. In the process, they determined who was conscious and how badly they were supposed to be injured. Since the victims have their clothes removed and their bodies cleaned before being passed along, the next group of responders doesn’t wear the same protective clothing.

Starting today, the exercise will expand to Fireman’s Park, where helicopters will land to pick up where the ground rescue leaves off. Swezey said each component has its necessary place in the process, with other activities scheduled in Niagara Falls and Lockport. Citing the use of a disaster plan designed for Y2K in responding to the Sept. 11 attack, Swezey said quality preparation for disasters and consideration of myriad possibilities is much more important than the plan itself.

“It’s not the plan, it’s in the planning,” Swezey said, paraphrasing a quote from President Dwight Eisenhower.

Contact reporter Daniel Pye at 693-1000, ext. 158.