Almost every single one of the Morongo Basin’s emergency response agencies will be participating in what they are calling a “Mass Casualty Incident Drill” inside of Joshua Tree National Park over several days next week.
The drill will simulate an event in which dozens of civilians are injured or killed in a remote section of the National Park, and allow first responders across local, county, state and federal agencies an opportunity to practice coordinating an immediate response to a potential disaster.
Participating agencies include the National Park Service, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, CHP, fire departments from the state, Marine Corps, and San Bernardino and Riverside County, the Desert Care Network, Morongo Basin Ambulance and Mercy Air.
San Bernardino County Fire Public Information Officer Eric Sherwin spoke with Z107.7 about next week’s events, describing what locals can expect and the importance of the drill.
“This drill is going to take place on Monday, (2/10), Wednesday (2/12) and we’ll be repeating the same scenario on Saturday (2/15).
There will be a lot of emergency equipment moving into the National Park. You’re going to see fire engines. Your’e going to see ambulances, heavy rescue equipment, and helicopters. This is a simulation, it’s a drill.
We will be talking on our radios, but one of the challenges of the drill will be determining which radio channels these units would choose to work on in the event of a real emergency.
This drill is expected to take four hours, and we can’t preface every communication with ‘this is a drill.’ At the beginning, that announcement will be made over that channel. After that, communication will be conducted in real time as if it was a legitimate emergency.
This is an exciting opportunity, and speaking on behalf of San Bernardino County Fire I can say that all of our crews do two hours of training every day. We also have monthly training and quarterly training. The MCI drill would fall under our quarterly training, where the assets and people involved requires a lot of planning.
And we recognize out here, especially in the National Park, that it is a cooperative effort. It really takes multiple agencies to successfully mitigate an incident like the one we are training for.
It’s a good learning opportunity and it prepares everybody to work well together to ultimately save lives and treat the injured.”
