| This past weekend, EMS crews from Honey Brook represented Chester County Station 11 as part of the Pennsylvania EMS Strike Team at a state wide drill in Orefield, PA. The only information the crews were given prior to the drill was that the dispatch for the drill would take place between 0900 and 1000 hours on Friday morning. The crews readied their equipment and anxiously awaited dispatch through the county RSAN on Friday morning. The crew was dispatched at approximately 1117 hours with the following information, "EMS Strike Team deployment for Orefield PA departure time 12:00 noon. Rendezvous @ St. 87. This is a drill."
The crew packed up last minute belongings and traveled to Uwchlan Ambulance Corps (Station 87) to rendezvous with the other Strike Team 11 members from across the county. From there the caravan traveled to Orefield and checked into base camp.
Camp was set up in between briefing and training sessions on Friday night. Also on Friday night, one of our crew members, Kathryn Suskie, was selected to be part of the Incident Command structure for the duration of the event.
Saturday morning at approximately 0600 hours, our team was deployed to Mount Pocono Medical Center and then to East Stroudsburg High School to assist in setting up a hospital after a simulated natural disaster that destroyed the local hospital. Our team worked with another strike team from Philadelphia to set the hospital up, and then we acted as simulated patients for the Hospital personnel to triage and treat. After that we broke down the hospital and returned the school cafeteria to it's normal appearance.
We packed up the trailers of equipment and headed back to base camp, where we learned that simultaneously other strike teams were deployed to a simulated plane crash with bridge collapse and a simulated bus accident. All in all, there were about 15 strike teams with about 163 providers from across the state that attended the drill. Unfortunately, our drill weekend was cut short due to actual bad weather. So we packed up camp and returned home at about 2000 hours on Saturday evening.
Many thanks to Uwchlan Ambulance and crew for transporting the majority of our equipment for the weekend, and to Chester County EMS 3 and crew for providing excellent leadership through out the weekend. We learned a lot and are very proud to be a part of such a knowledgeable team. |
