The NDMS system in each State is coordinated by one of the following Federal Coordinating Centres; the Air Force, Navy, Army or Department of Veteran Affairs, and may cover a single location or many, depending on its population.
The scope of the exercise was to simulate a mass-casualty disaster that required transportation of multiple patients and helped to prepare Municipal, County, State and Federal agencies to work together to promote and streamline inter-agency coordination. The latest one for Colorado was hosted at Centennial Airport on Wednesday 20th April.
NDMS can be activated as a result of numerous scenarios; in the event of a major disaster a State Governor may request Federal assistance under authority of the Disaster Relief Act of 1974, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can recommend that the President may make a declaration of a major disaster or emergency and the Secretary of Defense also has the authority to activate the system in the event of a national security emergency.
The morning of the exercise started dull and grey with low mist at Centennial Airport which was designated as the Patient Reception Area (PRA). This utlised a secondary ramp owned by Signature Aviation plus most of its large hangar, also situated by that same ramp. All briefings were held in the hangar which also served as a staging area for 'patients' being taken on and off aviation assets. All of the patients were volunteers and were tagged with a bar-code so they could be tracked through the system for the life of the exercise.
The first aircraft to arrive was a Wyoming Air National Guard C-130H which landed at dawn ready to receive its temporary payload of patients for the day. Patients were led out to the aircraft and situated inside in both seated positions and on stretchers, depending on their simulated injury. They were then led off the aircraft or stretchered out into the hangar to be processed and assessed as to whether they should be transported to local hospitals via air or road.
At this point the C-130's job was done and it departed before any of the helicopters arrived, leaving space on the ramp for the rotary assets to operate safely. In all, eight helicopters took part with the majority coming from the Colorado Army National Guard (CO ARNG) based at Buckley Air Force Base. There were four H-60 Blackhawk and three LUH-72A Lakota helicopters from the CO ARNG and a single civilian participant, a Bell 407 from Air Methods / AirLife Denver. Incidentally, this was the first exercise the CO ARNG LUH-72As have taken part in since being delivered little more than a month ago.
The role of the helicopters was to transport the patients to designated hospitals in the metropolitan area. The medical team in the hangar, after stabilizing the patient for transport, sorted, assessed and matched patients to the participating hospital facilities dependening on the patient's needs.
Patients were again either walked out or stretchered out to their helicopter and then flown to one of the ten hospitals in the metro area taking part in the airlift part of the exercise, and these ranged from three to 51 nautical miles from Centennial Airport.
Patients were dropped off at the hospitals and transferred from the helicopters by hospital personnel to complete the exercise. The patients were picked up later by buses and returned to their point of origin. Around 250 people were moved in a pretty short space of time and the only passengers who came back to Centennial in the helicopters were the observers - these having been tasked with fine-tuning the operation for future reference.
Weather hampered operations initially and a shortage of volunteer patients necessitated a change of plan in the afternoon which extended the exercise duration, but these would be variables for the multiple agencies to sort out in a real world situation so were simply dealt with as the operation continued.
2011-04-27 - paul
a brilliant article i will read it again.
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