This morning at UMMC there were men in funny looking suits and teens getting sprayed with water, but that doesn't mean it wasn't serious business.
Local firefighters who comprise the county's hazmat team and hospital workers came together for a decontamination drill aimed at both practicing roles should some serious chemical ever get spilled in the county, but also served as a chance for evaluators to grade and critique how emergency responders handled their roles.
Typically -- we would expect -- if there was an event that required a number of people to be decontaminated it would happen somewhere out in the county, not in the hospital's parking lot, but for drill purposes the first decontamination tent (this stage is called "gross decontamination") was set up not far from UMMC's emergency room.
Patients were brought in either standing or on gurneys and sprayed down.
The purpose is to remove as much of whatever is on them before transport in an ambulance.
Once they arrive at the hospital, hospital staff begins find decontamination -- scrubbing down each patient.
From there, they pass into ER where a triage team determines what treatment is needed and who gets treated first based on the severity of their medical condition.
A good description for how it went would be managed chaos.
There were some unexpected glitches -- such as gurneys not going through one of the side doors without volunteer firefighters to lift them because of a step -- but also everybody seemed to have a clear idea of their roles and patients were moved through the chain of treatment quickly.
The Byron-Bergen students who volunteered to be patients seemed to have fun. Several of them completed the decontamination process and then went back through it again.
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