County conducts disaster drill

Cathy Scott

Thursday, Oct. 16, 1997 | 9:57 a.m.

A Sunburst Airlines L1011 airliner, Flight 627 from Dallas with 163 people on board, crashes in Sunset Park.

That was the scenario in a disaster drill conducted Wednesday morning.

The exercise, the largest in Nevada history and designed to test the area's mass casualty plan and emergency and hospital personnel response, was a learning experience, said Girard Page, an operations officer for the Clark County Office of Emergency Management.

"We had some hitches," Page said. "None of them were glaring."

The biggest hitch, he said, was communications, adding that 300 people participated.

"The communication net between the first responders and the hospitals could be improved," he said. "The plan said we should call (the hospitals) more frequently. We need to look at how often and what we need to tell them so they can handle the influx of patients."

What made this exercise different from plane crash simulations in the past was it was done at Sunset Park and not at McCarran International Airport.

"What that forced us to do was have a unified command system," Page said. "We had to bring all the resources to Sunset Park, rather than having everything already there."

Tom Warden, spokesman for Clark County, said working with other agencies, including area hospitals, state agencies, volunteer organizations and representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, "was a tremendous success."

"We had a reality level and a fantasy level," he said. "You always learn more when you get out in the field and do it. What this incident does is test how a community reacts to a mass casualty incident that would tax the hospitals and transportation systems for the injured."

Real traffic around Sunset Park was slowed but not shut down during the four-hour exercise, Worden said.

"Injured" people were taken to area hospitals "not only through the hospital doors but into the emergency room and into the actual X-ray rooms to see if the hospitals could handle that many people," he noted.

They could, he said.

Robert Andrews, Clark County emergency management director, said they "intentionally overcrowded casualties."

He, too, noted that field communications to the hospitals came in "late and less than perfect. We've got to have a better communication system from the incident and Mercy Ambulance to the hospitals."

SUN REPORTER Mary Manning contributed to this story.