Just after 1:30 p.m., a dispatcher calls for help for a crash at the Brown County Fairgrounds with unknown injuries.
Two officers with the Nashville Police Department are first on scene. They keep their distance, though, as a cloud billows from two leaking tanks hitched to a truck.
One person is lying on the ground. The driver of the truck hauling the tanks is standing near the other truck that just rear-ended him.
“What’s going on?” one officer asks, still keeping his distance.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]The driver that rear-ended the truck is barely breathing, still in the driver’s seat. He’s coughing. His passenger has been pulled from the truck with a possible broken leg.
The driver carrying the tanks does not want to leave the other driver’s side, and he’s too big for him to pull out by himself.
“I’m having trouble breathing,” the driver says, as he, too, begins to lie on the ground.
“That ammonia is all over.”
Soon, a Columbus Regional Hospital ambulance arrives, but paramedics keep their distance as well. It’s clear this is no normal car crash.
The two tanks have anhydrous ammonia in them. It sucks moisture from the body and displaces oxygen in the lungs, and it can be fatal.
Brown County (Nashville) volunteer firefighters arrive, and Chief Nick Kelp grabs a pair of binoculars to check out what the tanks are carrying. He hadn’t heard that news on emergency radio because the fire department has different radio systems than police; plus there was a complication overall with radio communication in the county that day.
The rest of the volunteer fire departments in Brown County are called to help. Their job now is to maintain the scene and help the victims until a hazmat team from a neighboring county arrives.
No, you did not miss a hazmat incident in Brown County.
On Nov. 9, Police, firefighters and EMS personnel all gathered for a full-scale exercise sponsored by the Brown County Local Emergency Planning Committee and Brown County Emergency Management Agency.
A full-scale exercise allows first responders to practice responding to a large-scale incident in real time.
County commissioner Jerry Pittman volunteered to act in this scenario as the driver of the truck carrying the ammonia.
“It’s nice to know people are training for these kinds of incidents. … I’m glad to help them out. Things do happen from time to time. I know they might not have to deal with something like this for years, but then again, it could happen tomorrow,” he said.
A second ambulance arrived on scene while Pittman and the other scenario actors were still in the middle of the ammonia cloud.
By 2:15 p.m., the rest of the fire departments are beginning to arrive, too. Kelp briefs them. “It’s good to approach where the officers are, since they are still standing,” he said.
With their turnout gear and breathing apparatuses on, volunteer firefighters make their way toward the toxic smoke and the three victims.
By that time, Pittman, the driver who was rear-ended, is lying on the ground near the officers, struggling to breathe and coughing. Firefighters grab him first and put him in a rescue basket to drag him to safety.
They soon return to grab the other driver, who has a better chance of surviving since he’s been in the car with the wind blowing away from him.
Firefighters then pull the passenger who has been outside to safety.
Then, police and firefighters begin to discuss how they can notify surrounding homes and businesses of this hazmat incident. The same day, the Brown County Humane Society’s Chocolate Walk is happening less than a mile away in downtown Nashville, with at least 1,200 extra people walking around town.
The decision was made to not use a public-address system to tell people to shelter in place because it would cause mass panic.
Instead, Brown County Emergency Management Association Director Susan Armstrong says she will make a post to the EMA’s Facebook page for the Brown County Democrat newspaper to share. She will contact the editor to make sure she knows about it.
Soon, a reporter arrives on scene with questions.
“The fire department is on scene. They have it under control,” said Nashville Police Chief Ben Seastrom.
Firefighters and officers went door-to-door at homes near the fairgrounds to tell residents to shelter in place until the crash is cleaned up.
“They need to turn off any outside air. I know it’s cold, so make sure there isn’t any air conditioning going. Shut down their furnaces so it doesn’t draw air in from the outside. Wood stoves are fine. This isn’t something that will catch fire,” Seastrom tells the reporter. “Wet towels around the bottom of the doors if they leak, and stay right where you are.”
A perimeter also was set up near the crash scene to prevent traffic from entering the area. No one is in immediate danger, Seastrom adds.
He estimates it will take another two hours before the scene is cleaned up as they wait on the hazmat team, and everyone will be notified once it’s cleaned up.
Preparing for the worst
In addition to Pittman, Armstrong’s teenage son, John, and his friend, Trevor Stewart, volunteered to act in this scenario. John Armstrong was the other driver and Stewart was the passenger. Before it started, the actors were taken to the County Office Building to have wound makeup done so they would look more realistic.
Before it started, Corey Frost, the county’s emergency preparedness manager, watched Old State Road 46 to make sure no fire departments or officers were doing “drive-bys” to get hints on what the exercise was.
“I just want to see how they roll in on this,” he said.
“You can’t train enough for a job that can kill you.”
The parking lot at the Law Enforcement Center is where the fire departments assembled. They were put in order of when they would most likely arrive on scene.
“In the real world, it would take Nashville Fire about 20 minutes to get on station,” he said. The station is just uphill from the fairgrounds, but all firefighters are volunteers, so they are not there all the time.
“The goal is to have Nashville Police respond first, followed by Columbus Regional Hospital ambulance, then Nashville Fire, with backup fire departments flowing in,” Frost said.
The scenario played out exactly as organizers hoped, with each unit rolling in as expected, and with many volunteers, too. “This level of participation, this is fantastic,” Frost said as he watched the exercise. “I am definitely pleased with the response.”
“All departments were told during the safety briefing that if they needed to leave for a real-world emergency, they could do that, and we actually had the police department and EMS leave to go handle a call and return,” Armstrong said.
A contractor helped design, develop and facilitate the exercise. The tanks had visible smoke coming from them thanks to Halloween fog machines that Jason Games, with Resilient Strategies, put in that morning.
The county’s Geographic Information System map director, Tom Reoch, manned a drone that flew over the exercise. He was recording it for a training video.
“We have thermal (imaging), so we can detect different kinds of gas leaks,” Reoch said about a drone’s role in emergency situations like this.
“We can also determine through smoke if there’s any body heat or anything like that. The little drone we have, it’s used for clearing buildings, so I could go inside the school and go from room to room if I needed to,” he said.
During the exercise, Kelp dispatched Reoch and his drone to get closer to the tanks to see where the leaks were and how big they were. Smaller leaks are more difficult to find since the ammonia doesn’t come out all at once.
These types of exercises are important for emergency responders to participate in since even Brown County isn’t immune to hazmat leaks. One weekend in 2015, a hazmat incident similar to this one actually happened, when a trailer carrying a tank full of anhydrous ammonia spilled on Gatesville Road.
The last full-scale exercise the county’s emergency responders participated in was around 10 years ago. “This is the most valuable training, because it’s practicing together,” Susan Armstrong said.
“They have to think how they respond and maintain the scene until help arrives. What are they going to do in that time to make sure patients are safe?”
Lessons learned
After the exercise, everyone met back at the EMA office to discuss what went right and what went wrong.
Games helps run these exercises in counties across the state.
“The thing I took away from this one was the participation. … To have every fire department represented is amazing. … To have law enforcement presence and being engaged, I don’t get to see that too often. Kudos to all of you guys for taking the time out of your day on a Saturday,” he said.
Brown County Dispatch Supervisor Brenda Wojdyla spoke about the difficulties in initially dispatching the crash. Dispatch called out fire, police and EMS at the same time, she said.
“We had some issues with the radios in the truck picking up the first dispatch. We had a little issue over here initially getting that traffic out, but once we got that identified, we did it again and it seemed to go,” Armstrong said.
Officer Justin Anderson said he, too, had difficulties getting his radio to send any message through the channel they were told to use.
Fire and police were using different radio systems. The radios in the fire trucks also were not working, Kelp added.
Armstrong said no one knew the radios were an issue until Kelp could not communicate with anyone.
She said the hope is the new communication tower going in near the overlook on State Road 135 North will help fill in those holes and prevent similar problems in the future. She said they continue to work to get all of the emergency departments on the same radio system, but that costs money.
The responding agencies created a unified command once everyone was on scene, like they usually do when responding to crashes, Kelp said. “It’s not like one of us comes in and says, ‘We’re in charge.’ It’s just understood commonly,” he said.
The group also talked about how decontamination procedures were not set up initially, which is important to do first when helping anyone involved in a hazmat incident.
“It’s hard to get a group of people who want to go, go, go … do decon before you go help somebody,” Kelp said.
Mike White, the hazmat specialist with the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, also attended the exercise. He told the firefighters that hazmat is no different than responding to a fire, meaning that rescuing victims is a primary concern.
“I heard people say, ‘It will ruin our turnout gear.’ Do you want to explain to that mother or father that their kid died because you didn’t want to wear your turnout gear? We’ll get your turnout gear replaced,” he said.
Overall, Armstrong said she was happy with the turnout for the exercise, especially since the majority of participants were volunteers.
Kelp said overall his department will focus on more hazmat training after participating in the exercise. He said that’s important because hazardous materials are transported on State Road 46 and on the railroads in the county.
“If you get in the rut of doing what you normally do day in and day out, and you have something like that thrown your way, it’s kind of a curveball where you have to stop and think about things a little bit more instead of reacting,” he said.
