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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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School Bus Plunge (On Purpose)
I spent most of the day Sunday working at the scene of a school bus that plunged (buses always "plunge"!) over the side of a steep embankment on Ouray County's famous "Million Dollar Highway" below Red Mountain Pass.
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The good news is, we pushed the bus over; it was a field training exercise for Ouray County EMS, which ran the exercise, the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team, our vehicle extrication team, the Ouray Fire Department, the county sheriff's department, and a few others mixed in for good measure, including representatives of two adjacent counties. We even had mock victims to save; 15 people who were made up with fake injuries and inserted into the bus (yes, after it was sent over the side, and after it was stabilized to ensure no one got hurt for real).
I'm a volunteer for our EMS system, but I actually worked it via my "other" volunteer job: I'm the county communications guy, and it was my responsibility to ensure everyone had the ability to communicate. We used six different channels to do it. Once we had everything in place, I didn't have all that much to do, so I ran around with my camcorder and shot a bunch of video -- including footage of the bus going over. It's a fairly wild shot (there's a slow-motion of it at the end), and the following video puts it all into perspective for you:
And by the way, yes: my wife is in there too, if you know where to look. :-)
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Posted by Charles, Menomonie, Wisconsin on June 2, 2008:
Very nice video.
But 6 channels? One per agency I would assume. One of the things that the Minneapolis disaster people found was that going to 800MHz let them manage the scene with two channels if I remember correctly.
Check out the Minneapolis fire departments' actions on the I35W bridge collapse last August!
They coordinated the efforts of 11 counties and a dozen communities in a marvelously well fashion, in part because of such training exercises on an on-going program.
Increasingly, multiple agencies are involved in anything major. Their operations team includes finance, media relations, and other essential but often overlooked parts of any organization.
Emergency teams operations are like movies, they begin somewhere. The situation gets awful, without warning. Then the team is assembled and their analysis and action efforts begin. First nobody knows much--at least anyone who can tell about it (this time is now much shorter due to cell phones,) in I35W incident, the fire commander was on a motorcycle, on his way to the Twins game, he diverted and when to a bridge down river of the scene and set up a command post (which displeased the Homeland inSecurity people.)
They made a couple of videos of the incident--there was LOTS of video available! (At some point soon it will be possible to backtrack anything to it's 'source' by examining available video. While video evidence may or may not become enough to convict, it will make it much easier to track things. There ARE good aspects to 100% surveillance. Imagine losing your 2-year-old at a major theme park. Wouldn't it be nice if you could call park security and ask them to locate her? And have them tell you real time, that she is 20' from you around the corner?
We need even better emergency response than ever--since the President pulled the National Guardsmen into service, we have lost a major aid in handling disasters--one which has not been replaced.
Disasters tend run in a declining numbers as their intensity rises. Very small ones (say, paper cuts) are extremely common, and large ones like broken legs are more common, but 9.0 earthquakes and category 5 hurricanes are relatively uncommon, and huge asteroid impacts have become extremely rare.
As our society covers the globe, disasters can be more easily handled than ever, because the likelihood of a disaster that affects more than a small portion of the possible emergency response team, is very rare--but we do not always, or even often, use the resources which would be available if we were not out there killing each other.
Which would you rather your child or yourself have as a profession: firefighter or infantryman? Saving lives and property or destroying them?
Impressive exercise all round, especially doing it without any injuries!
(Oh, ya, school buses in particular always plunge because they are so heavy--the old standard design is like steel tube.)
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You're comparing apples and oranges when you put a VHF simplex and repeater system up against a trunked 800 MHz system. In trunked systems, "channels" are the physical infrastructure, and two "channels" can handle a much larger number of "talk groups".
But the bottom line is no, not one per agency. Rope teams need a dedicated channel to coordinate rescue. A command channel is used by the incident commander to organize teams; team leaders use separate channels to coordinate their teams. And all of this should be done off the dispatch channel -- dispatchers don't need to hear chatter. They do need to hear calls from the incident commander for resources. It adds up, and the function of the communications coordinator is to ensure everyone who needs to talk can do so, that those who don't need to talk shut the heck up, and that the channels in use don't interfere with each other.
With 800 MHz (and other non-compatible) systems, we have a further function: patch together systems so that someone on 800 that needs to talk to someone on VHF can do so. We do have that equipment in our Comm Van, but we didn't need it for this simulation. -rc
Posted by sobo, Kennewick, WA on June 4, 2008:
I have been in Mountain Rescue for the past 5 years here in Washington state, and applaud your volunteerism and EMS work. It's good to see exercises such as these, and testing the coordination and cooperation that is the single most important piece to making these rescues what they are, instead of clusterf@#$s. You speak the truth to Charles when you say how many channels are needed and who talks to who on what channel. I was in the comm van on one exercise and it just about wiped me out mentally, much more so than being in the field attending to the subjects. Good on ya, mate!
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After awhile, you learn what you can tune out, and what you need to hear. It isn't perfect, of course, but it keeps you from going crazy.... -rc
Posted by Phil, California on June 9, 2008:
Great note about adrenaline, Randy -- that's a lot of why anybody should train for emergencies (or combat), since those who haven't are clueless about why they're so agitated on a real scene, including law enforcement (think freeway chases here in SoCal, and the ass-kicking Rodney King got when they finally got him stopped; that's gotta be a big piece of it).