Local emergency services tested in mock disaster

The stage was set and the roles were in place on Friday. But when it came time to test Monroe County’s disaster services in Bloomington, the public felt dead in the process – literally. \nThe mock disaster scenario was planned months in advance, said Valerie Luchauer, emergency management agency director for Lawrence County. She was one of nearly 100 mock victims that volunteered to play roles of dead or hurt victims at Bloomington High School North on Friday night.\nLuchauer said the mock disaster exercise, which included Brown and Bartholomew Counties as well, was the “very first 24-hour, full-scale exercise that ever was done in the state with three counties simultaneously.” \nLuchauer said 500 to 1,000 people, including responders and mock victims, volunteered from all three counties. The drills were funded by a $770,000 grant from the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.\nThe majority of volunteers had fake blood on them with the occasional screw glued to their foreheads and other parts of their bodies. It was all to simulate a dirty bomb that was to go off in the school during a basketball game in Bloomington High School North’s gymnasium.\nThe volunteers seemed excited and ready to act out the roles given to them on cards that were hanging around their necks telling them what symptoms they had. Tim Kinzel, an IU sophomore in Delta Sigma Pi, had a screw glued to his forehead. The symptoms on his card included pain inside his nose and burns on his skin.\n“It seemed kind of cool, like something neat to do,” Kinzel said. “Like a once in a lifetime opportunity.”\nBut 35 minutes after officials from the high school called police to inform them of a “mock explosion in the school” police, firefighters and other emergency management departments had just arrived and were still parked outside without entering the building as the mock victims were moaning in “pain” on the gymnasium floor.\n“We have all come to the conclusion that if this is a huge failure ... we had better be prepared for our own dead butts,” said mock victim and Ivy Tech Community College student Lisa Anderson after waiting for nearly three hours in the high school’s gymnasium.\nBy then, four Bloomington police officers were “killed” from a chlorine gas cloud and three firefighters were “shot” to death in addition to one firefighter being held hostage by a terrorist.\nAll of this occurred as first responders were staged outside near command centers and were still figuring out if the school was safe to enter. \nMindGent Security Solutions, an Indiana-based consulting firm that specializes in “table-top and full-scale exercises” to test counties’ responses to similar “attacks” such as Bloomington High School North’s, was on hand monitoring the progress of first responders, said director Rick Ball.\n“We know we might make mistakes,” Luchauer said before the exercise. “But why not make the mistakes during the exercise so that we can realize what can we do to improve so if it happens in real life, we’re better?”\nBut Anderson said she was “really discouraged” about the slow response time.\n“We shouldn’t go to things where we have large amounts of people because if something happens, it’s every man for himself because people aren’t organized,” she said.\nDeb Rayl, a custodial supervisor for Bloomington High School North who helped in directing people where to go during the exercise, said she thought a lack of communication between responders contributed to the slow response.\n“I don’t think that (the exercise) failed,” she said. “It just didn’t go the way that they wanted it to. ... If we had a (real) emergency, the response would have been better.”