At Washington Dulles International Airport, suddenly a small airplane bursts into flames on the runway, which forces another plane to veer off and crash. Sirens can be heard in the distance, as hospital staff and emergency response teams quickly mobilize to assess the number of casualties.
As it turns out, there actually is no disaster. In fact, this elaborately conceived emergency drill was staged for training purposes to ensure disaster-response personnel have up-to-date experience in the event of an airport disaster.
This timely investment in training will help police and airport personnel identify failures in protocol, as well as understand what improvements should be considered going forward. Participating agencies included police, firemen, and other rescue workers from nearby communities.
Robert Yingling, assistant media relations manager at Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, said staging the realistic drill maintains a high level of expertise for responding to and managing a potential airport disaster.
“We get hands-on experience, which is so valuable when it comes to working with actual actors playing victims and our mutual aid partners — something we drill for which we hope will never have to play out for real,” said Yingling.
Following the disaster drill, airport officials say they will take those lessons learned and incorporate them into an operations manual.
“We will reconvene after the exercise,” said Tom Kenney, Deputy Fire Chief at Dulles Airport, “We will get together to figure out what worked well and we’ll go back to the manual to revise it again.”
When it come to preparedness, disaster and crisis management exercises are among the top civilian concerns and rightfully so. Officials would be remiss to ignore the important lessons learned from the tragedies in Boston and Texas. We can only hope that disaster preparations will continue to spread across the nation as more organizations assess their own protocol and strategies.
Dulles Airport was among a number organizations and cities around the country that held emergency drills in the wake of the Boston bombings and the Texas explosion. The Chicago Rockford International Airport held similar emergency training and disaster response exercises in May 2013, and police and other first responders held a car crash simulation in Shreveport, La. These drills will save lives.