On Saturday, December 30, 2023, several fire departments partnered for training exercises that were conducted at the Black Eagle Community Center.
“The purpose of the training is to practice what we call a mass casualty incident or multiple patient incidents,” said Justin Grohs, general manager for Great Falls Emergency Services.
Grohs explained, “As you can imagine, most of our 911 calls are for a single patient and sometimes two or three or four, maybe if it's a vehicle accident, but there's always the possibility for an incident with many more patients, say 10, 15, even 30 patients and those are managed a lot differently than a standard one patient incident.”
CMR High School drama students volunteered to be the patients for the exercises.
“It’s just important because if this scenario does happen, then the fire department and the responders know what to do in case it actually happens to other people because it's not very common that somebody gets impaled by a plastic fork, so it's good to know like what to do if that does happen,” said Chayse Seaburg, a senior at CMR High School.
This was a joint training exercise including the Black Eagle Volunteer Fire Department, Great Falls Emergency Services (GFES), Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), Vaughn Fire Rescue, and Great Falls Fire Rescue.
“These types of incidents require multiple agencies [and] as many resources as we can come up with, so it's nice to practice and work on the communication and interface between all those different agencies as well,” said Grohs.
“It's also good for them to learn how to work together more so like the EMTs, firefighters, people at the hospital, it's good for all of them to have their communication and being able to work together in a fast, steady motion,” said Seaburg.
These training exercises are held a few times a year and majority of the involvement is all volunteers.
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