McCarran drill prepares crews for disaster

By Kyle B. Hansen

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2009 | 7 p.m.

Practicing basic emergency skills at McCarran International Airport requires dozens of police officers, about 50 firefighters and 200 high school students covered with fake blood and gruesome wounds.

Those were just some of the hundreds of people involved in Wednesday’s emergency exercise at the airport, a practice run of a major accident as required every three years by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The simulated crash couldn’t prepare the airport for everything needed to respond to a real emergency, Clark County Director of Aviation Randall Walker said, but it was enough to learn the basics.

“No matter how much you train and prepare, you’re not really ever ready for what’s really going to happen in an event, but you certainly don’t want to be dealing with the basics in a real event,” Walker said. “You’ve got to be able to have those things instinctively and then deal with those real-world situations as they come up, which are difficult to plan for.”

The simulated accident involved a tour helicopter with six people on board crashing into an MD 80 passenger jet filled with about 60 people.

Five of the people on the helicopter “died” in the crash simulation and almost all of the jet passengers were injured.

At the beginning of the exercise, 50 students from Clark County trade schools laid scattered on the runway next to the jet and near the helicopter.

The students had arrived early to receive makeup, fake blood and realistic wounds.

Once the simulation began, emergency responders, including the Clark County Fire Department and Metro Police, had to respond as if it were a real crash.

About 150 additional students were spread out at nearly a dozen hospitals and medical centers for exercises there.

The details of the simulation were kept secret to make the exercise more authentic for those participating.

“The whole point is that you’re not supposed to know in advance,” Walker said. “We want to make it as spontaneous as possible so people have to think on their feet and do what they’re supposed to do.”

Smoke streamed away from the plane and helicopter when firefighters arrived and set up a command center to oversee the scene.

For firefighters, an aircraft crash is usually more difficult to respond to than a house fire, Clark County Fire Department spokesman Scott Allison said.

“In an aircraft incident at the airport we’re kind of going in blind,” he said, “But because of the training we have and some of the cross-training our department does, we’re pretty well prepared.”

Allison said aircraft present a number of challenges for firefighters, including hotter fires and the danger of fuel exploding.

“Any emergency incident is going to be different. There’s no two that are alike,” he said.

“When you figure we’re one of the busiest airports in the country now … we really have to be on our game, we have to be ready for any incidents,” he said. “We have to be prepared.”

Walker said the exercise took about a year to plan and involved about 40 organizations.

Communication among those groups is the key to proper emergency management, he said.

The simulation was based on something that could actually happen at McCarran because of the high number of tour helicopters that operate at the airport.

“We want to make it the event that would be realistic given the circumstances of this airport and we want to challenge all of the resources,” Walker said.

The simulation also involved other distractions, such as security breaches, that responders had to deal with at the same time as the crash.

“You throw all of these other curve balls in that people have to respond to and you see how they do,” Walker said. “As far as I can tell … it was very good.”

This was also the first exercise in which the airport was able to use a new command post at the airport’s administration building.