Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Long day...
Yeah, we're finished! I definitely could not do this type of thing every day. Just the highlights: The fire that my partner and I had to extinguish was a barbeque that was burning out of control. There is a regimented way you are supposed to approach the fire (for the training anyway)... so, Laura (my TSA agent partner) and I approached the fire in the proper way, and started using the fire extinguisher. The firefighters pulled a fast one on me, and only gave me a canister that was about 1/3 full, so I extinguished the fire part way, and had to call my "back up":) They went in, did their job, then the fire miraculously came back on again, so I had to go in *again* and put it out:) It was a good experience, but I don't think anyone is going to have a "back up" if their at -home backyard barbeque gets out of control.:))
We did lots of other drills. Our scenario was that a heavy monsoon hit Phoenix, and there were flash floods, heat waves, plus the utilities were off to the whole city. Trees were down everywhere, houses were destroyed, people were dead or dying or just needed help. We had to search the houses for dead bodies, mark the "people" (mannequins) with "I" (needs immediate care), "D" (delayed care) or "D" for dead. Then we had to search houses for survivors, etc. There is a correct way to search a house that is perfectly dark.... (because it is night time and the electricity and gas has already been checked by us before we enter). We have to mark the door that we have entered into in a certain way, then only go to the right or left for the entire way around that particular floor until we come back to the door we had marked. We found babies with missing appendages:( and people we had to carry out in a certain proper way.
We did lots of other drills today too like getting someone out from under a wall or car by "cribbing", and prior to doing all of this setting up a "chain of command" kind of like in the Army, which we spent four hours on yesterday! They (the Federal Government of course) developed this chain of command *after* 9/11 so that any rescue groups/fire/police etc. all use the same chain of command in a natural disaster or even if they are monitoring the Super Bowl, for example. It was 98 degrees today and I got fried. Jasmine just said "Mommy, why is your face so red".:)
I am so glad I don't have to do this regularly... plus I forgot my Alleve!! I would have to take two more *levels* to be "deployable", but I don't know how I would ever be deployable with Jasmine.... So ready to go to bed right now:)
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Over the next few days keep sloshing your sunburned face with 100% aloe vera gel and let it soak in repeatedly. A cosmetic surgeon at Mt. Carmel hospital told me once that the best thing one can put on a sunburn or to prevent/repair wrinkles in general is aloe vera gel or natural oils (sweet almond oil, jojoba oil, olive oil, etc.). He said all the $100 a jar creams and expensive face remedies are a waste of money, that the secret is simply “keep your face moist” with aloe vera.
Everything you described in your summary of your Wednesday training is how emergency teams responded to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I heard firsthand reports from friends, some living in New Orleans, others living in Hammond, above the “Big Easy.” Besides what you wrote, the looting problems began almost immediately after the flood hit and the electricity and phones crashed. The social unrest quickly spread to outlying small-medium sized towns. When frightened travelers or residents tried to make their way down roads, they encountered 5-6 sets of gangs roaming the freeway at once, all of them hungry, desperate and resentful. It was safer to take back roads, even walk the side of railroad tracks, than to take the major highways. Immediately grocery stores took on a look of a police state as armed guards were brought in because food, soap and water suddenly became the top “must have right now” item on everyone’s, including the roaming band of thieves’, list.
And I will spare you the evacuees' description of the terribly unsanitary conditions inside the Superdome where the hyper evacuees went, finding themselves “trapped on the inside” once they entered because authorities wouldn’t let them leave when they wanted to after they checked in there. Complete chaos reigned inside the Superdome as people, the rich and the poor alike, piled in to escape the Katrina flooding. That’s why experts always say, “If there’s ever a disaster, try very, very hard to make it on your own and don’t allow yourself to get ‘trapped on the inside’ with the other evacuees. Sometimes there’s no other option, but whenever there is, go it alone or team up with like-minded people.” During Hurricane Katrina complete strangers (good people) that normally never would have met learned in a split second that they had to rely on their instincts. They had to decide who they could or couldn’t trust, group off and stick together if they were to survive or keep the bad guys from stealing their food/water/other survival items or attacking them.
Even if you don’t take the other classes to become “deployable,” you never know where you’ll be or when you may need to rely immediately on the life-saving information you learned this week. But I don’t know how you made it through all that training in 98-degree heat!!! I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes out there.--B.
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