The mass casualty exercise at Womack Army Medical Center coincided with the deadly attack in San Bernardino, California, by pure chance, but hospital officials said the real world shooting, in which at least 14 people were killed and more than a dozen others injured, helped put the training exercise on Fort Bragg into focus.
The hospital must be ready for any number of situations, officials said, including shootings, plane crashes, bombs and severe weather.
To help, Womack performs a mass casualty exercise every six months, practicing for those and other scenarios.
Wednesday's exercise was meant to help the hospital prepare for a situation needing a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or explosive response.
Soldiers practiced triaging upwards of 75 patient role players, according to Marsha Lunt, Womack's emergency manager, ensuring their wounds were treated but also protecting themselves and others in the hospital from contamination.
In the scenario, a truck carrying the hazardous chemical dimethylamine wrecked at the intersection of Bragg Boulevard and Honeycutt Road, just outside the Fort Bragg gates.
The wreck involved several vehicles, including some carrying large numbers of troops.
The hospital staff had to treat traditional wreck injuries, as well as exposure injuries from the chemical, which could cause burning or respiratory problems.
Lunt said such a situation happening in real life isn't too far fetched.
"There are tanker trucks of hazardous material that go on Bragg Boulevard," she said. "If this were to happen, we want to be prepared."
Womack employees were alerted and recalled to the hospital as part of the drill just after 6 p.m.
About 1,000 members of the staff were actively involved in the training, Lunt said.
Another 1,000 employees remained focused on real-life patients.
Some of the first soldiers to receive a call were those assigned to the hospital's chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or explosive response, or CBRNE team.
By 6:30 p.m., members of the team had assembled and were suiting up in head-to-toe protective equipment, including respirators.
Col. Jeffrey S. Morgan, Womack's deputy commander for clinical services, said the level of protection was the same for the hospital's Ebola drills earlier this year.
He said the CBRNE team was important, because decontamination efforts protect the rest of the hospital in the event of such a situation.
In such a scenario, that protection is the top priority of troops.
"You can't risk injuring your own team in treatment," Morgan said. "You have to get your team ready to go first."
At a special building on the outskirts of the Womack campus, soldiers triaged patients and cleaned them of the chemicals.
Inside the hospital, other members of the team worked on a related emergency.
A patient involved in the fictional wreck arrived ahead of emergency personnel, contaminating the emergency department and another patient.
"They arrived before we were ready," said Col. Ken Shaw, the CBRNE team leader. "That could happen in real life, too."
Lt. Col. Sean Fortson, chief of the Womack emergency department, said hospital staff must be able to deal with such a situation without losing site of the bigger medical response.
"The difficulty is that we have to maintain precautions throughout the entire process," he said.
Morgan said the exercise was more rehearsal than test.
The goal, he said, was to help the hospital get better in its response, before medical personnel see the scenario in real life.
Shaw agreed.
"We need to improve the speed of our response, but do it safely," he said.
Three days before the exercise, a chemical accident in China killed 10 people, Shaw said.
And as troops trained, they did so knowing a hospital in California was going through a very real mass casualty response, he said.
Inside the hospital, Fortson said the hospital practices for these types of events because officials know they are real possibilities.
"Unfortunately, that's the climate we live in," he said. "We try to war game scenarios we my be confronted with."
———
©2015 The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.)
Visit The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.) at www.fayobserver.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
