Germantown firefighters along with area hospitals drilled Tuesday night for a potential mass casualty situation in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Students from Slinger and Carrol College played victims inside the Germantown Fire Station. They had fake blood and prosthetic wounds and a back story to tell rescuers the extent of their injuries.
The job of EMS responders was to go in and triage the victims.
“Pretend like this is a real scene so be it a school shooting, a concert and they’re coming in and they’re going to find the victims and give them each a tag,” said Melanie Sinclair, who is a trauma coordinator.
The tags the victims can get are black, gray, red, yellow, green. Black and gray are ones who likely will not make it. So the focus will be on the red and yellow victims.
“Obviously you only have a finite number of ambulances. Look at the event in Las Vegas, you probably had 500 patients. They probably didn’t have 500 ambulances there,” said Germantown Fire Chief Gary Weiss.
The EMS responders also practiced a program called Stop the Bleed. It was developed after the Sandy Hook school shooting. The idea is to get a tourniquet on and pack the gunshot wounds to give the most victims possible a chance.
The public can get their own basic emergency training for free on Nov. 11 at the Germantown Village Hall. All day firefighters will be on hand to train people in hands-free CPR, AED and Stop The Bleed training.
