MCI Drill

Every year here at McMurdo they have a staged MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) drill, so that in the event of a real disaster, the community will be prepared.  The medical facility here is very small and can only support a handful of patients at a time, so in the event of a bigger accident or disaster, a good portion of the community gets together to turn the firehouse into a backup hospital area where injured patients can go in the event of an emergency.  That drill was scheduled for today, and since earlier in the season I had volunteered to be a “stretcher bearer”, I had to jump in and help out as well.

So anyways, today at 1:00pm the alarm sounded and everyone was called to spring into action and participate in this drill to simulate a real disaster.  This is actually a pretty big event here in town, a lot of people get involved, and they actually shut down work for a couple of hours.  There are several different groups assigned to different areas…you have the stretcher-bearers, who transport patients from the vehicles into and around the hospital, there is also a security crew who keeps things under control and prevents unauthorized people from entering the firehouse/hospital, and then you also have a group in charge of playing the victims.  Well, they go all out with the victims, they are all assigned different roles and even put on make up and do their best to act out their parts/ailments.

So anyways, this all lasted a couple of hours and was pretty chaotic, but I did my best to help out by transporting the “patients” to/around the area.  The funny thing is, with all the planning that goes into this thing, it really does feel a lot like you would expect an actual emergency situation might feel like.  This all came about a few years back when there was a plane crash over Mt. Erebus and there was no plan in place to handle the amount of injured people, so all in all, I guess its probably a pretty smart idea to run these drills, plus I got the afternoon off of work, cant argue with that!