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Apr. 30--GREEN -- A dramatic stage was set Wednesday morning at Akron-Canton Airport.
Fortunately, it was only a stage.
A Boeing 717 arriving from Orlando and carrying 100 passengers did not collide with a Dornier 328 with 24 passengers sitting on a runway.
But to more than 50 emergency response agencies from Summit and Stark counties, Wednesday's airport disaster drill was treated as the real thing.
"The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] mandates that we do a full-scale disaster drill once every three years," said Kristie Van Auken, senior vice president/communications officer at the airport, a 2,900-acre facility that served nearly 1.5 million customers in 2008.
"It takes us six months to prepare for this with all the planning, practicing and troubleshooting. It's really quite involved."
Van Auken said 450 people, of which 120 portrayed victims of the staged crash, participated in Wednesday's drill.
All of the emergency vehicles and personnel were sent to a staging area on International Parkway on the west side of the airport. Twenty fire departments and eight police departments were among the 50 agencies.
"The equipment comes to a pin-pointed area away from the incident scene so that it doesn't create traffic jams," Green Fire Department Lt. Scott McClellan said.
"It makes it nice and organized. They check in and they stay here until we have a request, and then they are dispatched to the scene. This also helps us account for all the equipment and personnel at the end of what would be a very long day," he said.
The incident scene was at the northwest end of the airport.
There was a burning fuselage that was attended by the Green and Akron-Canton Airport fire departments. EMS personnel from several agencies treated injuries to accident victims. Ambulances transported several victims to area hospitals.
"We're trying to be as realistic as possible," McClellan said. "It looks like everything is in slow motion, but there is a lot going on. It's controlled chaos."
McClellan said the master plan is derived from the longstanding incident command system, which was devised decades ago by the U.S. Forestry Department to control emergency rescue personnel and equipment in fires out West.
"We really don't change much," McClellan said. "But we are constantly tweaking a little here and there. We are always trying to learn from the past and get better."
After Wednesday's staged disaster was cleaned up, the disaster drill is not close to being completed.
"There will be six months of evaluations," McClellan said. "We'll meet in groups and do other practices -- bus crashes, railroad car accidents, big fires, drownings -- to keep trying to get better.
"There always is new technology and equipment coming out, and we always want to test [it] out before we use it."
McClellan said officials learn after every drill "that communication is the biggest problem area."
"It's really a big part of putting everything together and getting it all ironed out before something like this actually happens," he said.
"Until you practice it, you aren't really ready. We believe we'll be a lot better prepared because of the drill."
Bill Lilley can be reached at 330-996-3811 or [email protected].
