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Editorial
Practice vital part of EMS training
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Coaches will tell you a team plays like it practices.
The same goes for any crew, from a group of employees trying to bring a new product to market, to fast-food workers striving to deliver a warm, tasty breakfast.
It's especially true when it comes to emergency response crews, like those from the city, schools and hospital who conducted a surprise drill, involving a mock bus/SUV collision Sunday with mass casualties.
Enter "drill" on the Gazette website and a long list of stories about emergency response exercises comes up.
There were intruder or "active shooter" drills at the public schools, hospital drills involving chemical contamination with hazardous materials, agricultural disasters such as diseases, mass evacuations and situations requiring shelter-in-place, terrorist attacks, and the list goes on and on, limited only by possibilities and the imaginations of those planning the exercises.
EMS crews also attended a workshop concerning transfer of battlefield medical skills to the civilian world.
Fortunately, most of the scenarios don't become reality, but emergencies are very real and it's not unusual to note that, not long after an exercise, responders are called out to an emergency that is not only very real, but not unlike one for which they have recently trained.
Those same Gazette archives reveal many stories about those major emergencies.
There was the major fire downtown that blocked off B Street for hours and destroyed the landmark Fuller's Family Restaurant (which quickly reopened in a new location), the recent chemical incident -- could it be called terrorism? -- that closed Walmart for hours, the Amtrak derailment between Benkelman and Parks, vehicle crashes with multiple injuries or fatalities and many more over the years.
It's never been a small sacrifice to serve on a volunteer fire or EMS squad, and it's becoming more and more difficult to find volunteers, with fewer and fewer people being available to respond to the call.
But respond they do, whether volunteers or paid professionals -- with so much training and dedication involved, there's little difference in the abilities of those who make it their full-time work and those who take time off from their day jobs to help their neighbors.
Most of us don't pay much attention when we hear that firefighters, ambulance crews, city, county and hospital officials are conducting another drill.
They're sure to get our attention, however, when we're the ones they're on their way to help.