MINIATURE ENVIRONMENT HELPS EMERGENCY RESPONDERS MEET CHALLENGES SAFELY

Release Date:  08 July 2008

 

Aberdeen, MD—Complex, computer-based simulated environments have revolutionized emergency response preparedness training, but members of Battelle’s Medical Readiness and Response Group (MRRG) are showing that innovative improvements can bring new effectiveness to traditional simulation tools as well.
 
Battelle’s  Steve Vaira and Tim Merkel of the Battelle Eastern Science and Technology Center in Aberdeen, Maryland, know how first responders think and plan when facing an emergency.  Vaira and Merkel both have served as community firefighters and emergency medical responders, and between them have more than 11 years experience in medical support to the nation’s chemical weapons destruction facilities.  They are key players in development and delivery of MRRG’s Trinity tabletop exercise system.
 
While tabletop preparedness exercises are an old—possibly even an ancient—idea, the Trinity system features the advantages of traditional tabletop training and exercises while incorporating innovations that make the exercise experience more comprehensive, and more easily tailored to specific communities and response challenges.

 

“While it has been said that experience is the best teacher, no one wants to experience a disaster just to be prepared for one,” Merkel said, adding that Battelle’s Trinity tabletop provides comprehensive visual aids such as a model city, complete with buildings, streets, people, and vehicles to allow first responders to loom over the cityscape and make decisions in response to scenario situations like hazardous chemical spills, explosions, or biological contamination.
 
The exercise system gives responders experience in sizing up a community emergency, using visual cues very similar to those they will actually draw upon during a real mishap.  This sizeup process can be a very visual one for responders, and a Trinity exercise, when properly facilitated, provides the visual cues responders need to make appropriate decisions.

 

A key part of the simulated environment is graphic floor plans of hospitals, in addition to the miniature community.  The hospitals include separate emergency departments and external service spaces, such as decontamination and helipad areas.

 

Disaster patients, simulated with cards similar to triage tags used by community responders, require not only triage but a medical treatment plan and use of limited treatment resources as well.  They must be “stabilized” and “transported” from the miniature city to the simulated hospitals.  Merkel said that responders frequently find that the challenges of limited personnel, and expendable resources such as medications or portable oxygen sets, can rapidly challenge untested assumptions of preparedness.  He noted that this ability to demonstrate weaknesses in existing emergency plans and processes is perhaps the Trinity tool’s greatest strength.

 

“An exercise is the perfect time to find out your system has flaws; during an emergency is not the perfect time.  Forcing exercise participants to take several minutes to ‘decontaminate’ each casualty, and allowing transport of only two patients in each of a limited number of miniature ambulances can highlight weaknesses in planning,” Vaira said.

 

“A key learning experience has been the ability of participants from differing fields within emergency response to see the problems and decision making of others that they would normally not see,” Vaira said.  “This allows communities and response agencies to gain experience in disaster response, work with their counterparts towards a common goal, and identify weak links in planning assumptions before they face a disaster,” Merkel said, adding, “And all without spending a fortune and risking personnel and equipment in a full-scale exercise.”


One new feature of the 72-square-foot miniature city and the associate simulated hospitals is rugged portability.  Traditional tabletop systems have either been fixed in a training facility or built with fragile miniature plastic buildings that are difficult to store, transport, and customize to specific response challenges.  Buildings for the Trinity system are collapsible laminated graphic shapes, allowing easy and cost-effective storage, shipping, and replication of specific structures or response venues.  “This system can provide the flexibility to simulate a specific response area, such as the venue for an upcoming political convention, for example, by creating a realistic model environment in a matter of a few days; a time- and cost-effective planning and training tool,” Merkel explained.

 

Under a different program used for chemical warfare response, Vaira and Merkel manage a full-size training manikin, known as a SimMan, that is remotely operated via computer and does everything from breathe to moan to cough and vomit.  This helps keep first responders up to date on current patient treatment protocols and procedures, particularly at the U.S. Army’s chemical weapons stockpile and destruction sites.  “Our chemical safety programs in the U.S. are so good that first responders get out of practice because they so rarely have to respond to an employee accident,” Vaira said.

 

This work represents one of Battelle’s many contracts providing various kinds of mission support to military, government and civil entities.  In support of this particular task, the MRRG team travels nationwide to different communities near chemical demilitarization sites.  They work with multiple federal, state, and local evaluators in tabletop, functional, and full-scale exercises to assess hospital, fire department and emergency medical response, and to provide medical preparedness training.  The Trinity tabletop and SimMan medical response exercises are currently popular features of MRRG’s Toxic Chemical Training Course, presented quarterly for U.S. Army and FEMA Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program students.

 

Battelle is the world’s largest non-profit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses:  Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy Technology, and Health and Life Sciences.  It advances scientific discovery and application by conducting $4 billion in global R&D annually through contract research, laboratory management and technology commercialization.  Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Battelle oversees 20,400 employees in more than 120 locations worldwide, including seven national laboratories which Battelle manages or co-manages for the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

 

Battelle also is one of the nation’s leading charitable trusts focusing on societal and economic impact and actively supporting and promoting science and math education.

 

Contact Media Relations Manager Katy Delaney at (410) 306-8638 or delaneyk@battelle.org or T.R. Massey, Media Relations Specialist, at (614) 424-5544 or masseytr@battelle.org for more information.