Published: November 02, 2009 09:17 pm      

CITY OF TONAWANDA: First responders converge on area for week of disaster drills

Three piles of concrete, mangled cars and simulated wounded littered the landscape at the former Spaulding Fibre site Monday as the first day of Vigilant Guard rescue exercises got under way.

The week-long event will mimic disaster conditions to train National Guardsmen and first responders from New York, other states, Canada, Denmark and the United Kingdom. While some of those training have never seen anything like the disaster they’re practicing, others have seen much worse. John Cronin, a squad leader for the Suffolk County Urban Search and Rescue Team, worked at Ground Zero after Sept. 11, 2001, and said his group was using the same techniques and same tools they used during that real-life emergency.

“This is as close as I’ve come to seeing that type of situation in a drill,” Cronin said.

Brigadier Gen. Michael Swezey, commander of the National Guard’s Joint Task Force 6 based in Buffalo, said the exercise developed out of the lessons learned, and mistakes made, while responding to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and fallout from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. University at Buffalo professor Bob Jacobi said this scenario, a 5.9 earthquake rippling out from Kenmore, might seem far-fetched to some but is more plausible than people think. In the last 20 years, the professor said his colleagues have found hundreds of geological faults in the area’s landscape. Just more than a decade ago, a small earthquake rocked the intersection of Delaware Avenue and Sheridan Drive, very near the point being used for the simulation.

Tonya Quarles was among those who signed on to serve as a simulated victim. Lying on the side of a rubble pile with a prosthetic arm wound — complete with plastic skin laid open to the bone and a hand-held pump that makes the wound ooze fake blood — Quarles said she picked up on the opportunity through word of mouth. When asked if she had any acting experience that would help her to scream in pain, she laughed.

“Yeah. Life,” she said with a wry smile.

Those going into the other nearby structures had plenty of noisy hydraulic and pneumatic tools to make their points of entry safe. And even though it’s just a drill, Cronin said his people were very aware that falling concrete doesn’t differentiate between training and real rescues if mistakes are made.

“This activity is very real,” Cronin said. “The way the pile is set up, if we move the wrong piece of concrete, if we don’t shore it right, we could cause another collapse.”

Starting today, the exercise will expand to Fireman’s Park, where helicopters will land to pick up where the ground rescue leaves off. Swezey said each component has its necessary place in the process, with other activities scheduled in Niagara Falls and Lockport. Citing the use of a disaster plan designed for Y2K in responding to the Sept. 11 attack, Swezey said quality preparation for disasters and consideration of myriad possibilities is much more important than the plan itself.

“It’s not the plan, it’s in the planning,” Swezey said, paraphrasing a quote from President Dwight Eisenhower.