By Alex Robinson
As smoke bellowed through the air Saturday morning at LaGuardia Airport, emergency personnel scrambled to tend to blood-soaked victims of a plane crash.
But the smoke was fabricated, the crash was a simulation and the blood was fake.
The Port Authority held an exercise to test the ability of emergency responders to handle a passenger aircraft accident and to work on inter-agency crisis management.
“Our first priority at all our facilities is public safety,” said Pat Foye, executive director of the Port Authority. “The purpose of this is really to make sure that were an event like this to happen at one of our airports, we’ll be prepared. It puts us in a position to protect the public the best we can.”
In the scenario, an engine exploded while the Boeing 737 was taking off, sending a blade and shrapnel into the plane’s fuselage and resulting in a crash landing and mass casualties.
Around 750 emergency workers responded to the simulated plane crash, including employees from a list of different agencies such as the FDNY, NYPD and Port Authority Police.
Paramedics buzzed around 120 volunteers, who were each given instructions to act as injured passengers. There were 145 victims in total in the staged event and dummies were used for the 25 passengers who died in the accident.
“It’s been a wonderful experience. It shows the cooperation and coordination between the various agencies,” said Ed Moran, an adviser at the Garden City Fire Department, who volunteered for the exercise and sat on the tarmac with a fake injury to his leg. “It was very well-run and very realistic.”
Emergency personnel first arrived to douse flames from a container, which had been set on fire, rather than the actual plane several hundred feet away.
After the fire was out, emergency personnel entered the plane and started setting up triage to tend to victims.
A twist in the scenario came when city Corrections arrived on scene. There was a prisoner who had been transported on the plane in addition to four detainees, and personnel were tasked with finding them and taking them into custody.
The city medical examiner’s office was also on the scene to conduct an investigation and work on their emergency management scenarios.
“They actually did an outstanding job. It was a very complex exercise we put on,” said Jim Munday, senior manager of Emergency Operations for the Port Authority. “They were learning and that’s what you want to have. You don’t want everything to go perfect, because if everything went perfect, we don’t need exercises.”
Munday said the exercise was carried out fairly flawlessly with a few minor missteps in terms of communication and coordination.
“For them just to come in and work together, it’s tremendous,” he said. “I saw a few hiccups out there, but that’s OK. We’ll discuss that in the debrief and those hiccups we can go back to work on.”
The Port Authority is mandated to do full-scale exercises every three years, but it conducts them every year in all three of its airports.
“It makes a vast difference,” Foye said. “Just like in sports, you play as you practice.”
Reach reporter Alex Robinson by e-mail at arobinson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
