Dekalb County’s Local Emergency Planning Committee will train on responding to a school bus accident Thursday.
DeKalb County Emergency Management Coordinator Charlie Parker said the training will test first responders on how to respond and communicate during a similar type of accident. Parker said the biggest challenge in responding to a school bus accident is the number of potential patients who need medical attention.
“When you start having six, or eight to ten patients, then you kind of start overwhelming our EMS system, and then the same thing [happens], when you start rolling eight or ten patients into our emergency room, then that kind of starts to tax them,” Parker said.
Parker said accidents that involve multiple people do happen often and referenced the recent wreck on Highway 111 in White County that involved 17 people. Parker said often times accidents like this require coordination with other county EMS Departments to respond.
“I know that would tax our system here as it did in White County,” Parker said. “They called for out-of-county resources to come and help them, and we would do the same thing. And that’s kind of why we pull the counties, you know, at that point, cause at any particular time, you know, you may have more or less responders depending on the shift or the time of day.”
Parker said communication with other first responders and law enforcement is very important when responding to an accident. Parker said DeKalb County will be testing out its new TACN communication system during the training.
“In the last few months, all of the agencies have switched to the TACN system,” Parker said. “So some of them are on different channels than they were before. Sometimes you can’t necessarily just talk from group to group, so we are looking at practicing that and how we switched to other channels and work on a common operating fixture.”
Parker said T-DOT will also be in attendance for the exercise. The exercise will begin at 9:15am on Allen’s Ferry Road.
Parker said he wants to notify people in the area that it is an exercise and is not a cause for concern.
