Glen Daniel, WV (WOAY): This Wednesday morning at the Liberty High School baseball field, a school bus flipped over and nobody was harmed. That’s because it was part of a training simulation where emergency personnel, school bus drivers, and students from the Beckley Academy of Careers and Technology all learned what to do in the event of a real crash.
Raleigh County Schools Transportation Director Christopher Toney said that the collaborative effort, including the use of a retired school bus, has been in the works for some time:
“This is the first time we’ve ever done a training of this magnitude. EOC (Emergency Operations Center) usually does trainings, like, with helicopters and airplanes when they’ve crashed. They’ve never done a school bus. So we talked last year and wanted to try to do something that we could all gain knowledge from. And this was what we came up with. They wanted to pick a rural area to be more realistic about exactly how long it would take individuals to respond.”
Emergency Planner for Raleigh County Emergency Services Tabitha Horn said that a realistic training environment gives personnel
“A real scenario is what we try to put on—something that may actually happen. So that way they can, you know, get their hands on it, [and say] okay, I know what to do. And it’s always good to prepare.”
All of the simulated crash victims were local school bus drivers. They each had specific roles to play; many were assigned various injuries, and others played dead. After the bus drivers had their wounds artfully applied by acting cosmetology students, they got in their positions and waited to be rescued.
With the bus tipped onto its left side, Raleigh County bus operator Kaitlynn Johnson awaited her rescue while hanging half of her body out of a right-side window:
“They had to pretend my arms were broken and had to move me without moving my arms as much as possible. And I played my part. I screamed; I cried. I was being belligerent. And you know, they put me on the gurney backwards, but they eventually got me where I needed to go. And then they loaded me up in this little basket gurney and brought me down the ladder. ”
After EMS arrived at the scene in real emergency response time and rescued victims, ACT nursing students performed triage, assessing injuries and prioritizing the most urgent care.
Student Nurse Jamila Bradford said that the experience has helped her and her classmates feel better prepared to handle medical emergencies in the future.
“Allowing us nursing students to come in and observe and get to actually participate is going to prepare us for the real world. That way, if anything ever happens, we’re going to be like, ‘hey, we already know what to do. Let’s get it done and save some lives!'”
The simulation was made as realistic as possible to prepare emergency personnel for the worst, but as many of the drivers experienced a disaster response up close, everyone at the simulation left feeling better prepared in the event of a real incident.
Raleigh County school bus operator trainer Mary Keene acted as the driver for the simulation, and described what she saw inside the bus:
“Everybody was thrown either out of the top of the bus or laid up against tangled in the seats… It was a little traumatic being in there, actually. But it prepares you. It’s like the more you can do to prepare for situations like this, the calmer you can react when the real thing happens.”
