How prepared is your town?

[THUMPER1156]

The way thing are going in the world today.Is your town prepared for a mci & how? 8-[

[Ridryder 911]

I think we should be prepared for MCI within reason. There is no way that every town is ever going to be "fully prepared" for everything. Way too much emphasis has been placed on potential doomsday events. Meanwhile grandma still has a heart attack, and there is no ALS that is able to respond. Which is more actually to occur ?

From what I have actually seen is several Fire, Rescue and a few EMS agencies.. grab grants and monies to feed their budgets. Shifting funds around to maintain status quo. Since a lot of the grant money is not "ear marked"; suppression equipment is purchased and equipment that has to be maintained or that can expire. It will be interesting in about 5 -10 years to see how much more money will be need to renew equipment.

Hopefully, maybe this will cause more mutual aid responses, communications between agencies and pre-planning in which emergency services was definitely lacking.

Be safe,

R/R 911

[AZCEP]

Only if your receiving facilities can handle a sudden influx of patients. Most hospitals barely squeak by with the normal day's activity. Add 10-20 patients all at once, and you can forget about it. Make it bigger and the problem expands exponentially. Even for something simple like a tour bus accident, there is no way most places can do things the way they are currently being done. Throw in a hazmat, or WMD response and you can forget having anything close to a timely response.

[Nate]

We are good as long as the people who live in Houston know how to follow directions, which doesn't happen.....

[Guest Beegers]

my area gets mcis fairly often....plane crashes from running off the roadway, buses colliding, a lot of mvas that require multiple cities to respond.

[EMT857]

we just had an mci last week that went extremely well, with mutliple squads and companies responding

[Guest]

My area is screwed.... nobody talks to anybody else. fire thinks they are in control and police will argue ....its a mess here

[MedicNorth]

Trying to "be prepared" for an MCI can lead into the mentality that we saw on the "impossible scenario" thread. There is always a potential or actual one larger than you can handle. We tend, especially after 9/11, to concentrate on What Ifs and Maybe's. Yes we need to be prepared, but the basic everyday service is guaranteed to be needed - we have to make sure that it is not crippled in the face of escalating "what if's". Interagency cooperation, mutual aid agreements, and planning are the low-cost alternatives to large scale physical stockpiling of goods and equipment to deal with the possible.

[Just Plain Ruff]

If the big one hits, no-one is going to be able to handle it. Bring in all the resources you need but the fact is, if you dont' have the infrastructure or facilities or equipment to handle it you will NOT handle it.

You just do the best you can with what you have. it's a common theme in America to throw money at something and it will get better. That doesn't work.

I wrote a paper on mass casualty situation with a WMD and got an A on it in my master's level health management class.. I'll try to post it here in a link.

We need to look at the overall picture like a post earlier said,

if you put all your resources into a MCI and then you have 1 or 2 people not involved needing an ambulance or a house catches on fire and you cannot respond then those people are not served well.

larger cities are better prepared cause there are more resources there, more hospitals, more resources a shorter distance but take the small county I used to work in. We covered 800 square miles with 3 ambulances but only 2 crews, sure we could staff the other ambulance but it would be tough. get a incident with 30 patients or in my paper 400 patients and you see the problems.

[EMT001]

we just had an mci last week that went extremely well, with mutliple squads and companies responding

You're talking about that bus accident, right?