HEADLINE
Sgt. Barry Jones and Cpl. Maciel Aguayo of the Tulare SWAT team give attendees a feel of what would happen in an actual hostage scenario.
“How often does the fire department have the opportunity to
practice cutting the roof of a school bus open or to evacuate stu- dents from an overturned bus?” asked Zamarripa. With this event in the bag, Zamarripa is already looking to
future exercises. Te times as well as the local landscape have changed recently, and according to Tulare’s transportation direc- tor, everyone needs to be ready. “Our job is to make sure that we are totally prepared for any event, from a bus catching fire to a rollover.”
Schools, Emergency Responders Train, Prepare for the Worst Case Scenario
By Stephane Babcock Emergency training can benefit any number of levels within a
community, from the people who bus students to those who treat and transport the injured. And it is anything but easy to organize. Robert Zamarripa from Tulare (Calif.) Joint Union High School Dis- trict spent months setting up his district’s recent mock accident drill. “We were a little overwhelmed at first by the amount of coor-
dination required to make an event of this size successful,” said Zamarripa, the district’s transportation supervisor for the past two years. “We wanted to make sure everything went according to plan.” For any other transportation directors out there thinking of plan-
ning a similar event, Zamarripa has two words: plan ahead. He also suggested rounding up as many volunteers as possible and focusing on the details of the drill, not the size of it. Easy for him to say, seeing as the event included the fire department cutting through a rolled- over school bus, the local SWAT team overtaking a school bus and first aid training. It was even advertised as the “Great, Big, Bodacious Bus Driver Training Event” in a flyer put out by chapter 14 of the California Association of School Transportation Officials. “Simulated exercises are important because they replicate real life
experiences,” said Zamarripa. “Tey provide an opportunity to liter- ally walk through the event and experience it first hand as opposed to reading about it or discussing it in a classroom environment.” It was not just a unique training event for Zamarripa’s de-
partment, but for the community as a whole. While this type of emergency training is more common for law enforcement, they don’t always have the opportunity for “hands on” practice.
24 School Transportation News Magazine January 2010
CELEBRATING WITH AN ‘ACCIDENT’ For some organizations, this year’s National School Bus Safety
Week gave them the needed excuse to hold emergency train- ing events of their own. In Avonmore, Ontario, one school bus contractor, three transportation directors, police, fire and EMS teams from three counties and a group of students from a local high school converged to hold another inaugural mock school bus accident. Mark Begg, the operations manager of Delaney Bus Lines Limited, believed the national holiday would be an ideal opportunity to hold the event. “We wanted to make sure we have done our part to provide
our local emergency services with some training in the event such a disaster occurs,” said Begg. “We also wanted to make sure we were being proactive in promoting safety during School Bus Safety Week, not only to students and the public, but to all stakeholders that could be involved in the event a school bus is involved in an accident.” Te festivities were launched with an official proclamation
from the town crier for the city of Cornwall. Te “accident” in- volved a school bus that had rolled over onto another vehicle. Emergency teams extricated all the “injured” students from the bus and then proceeded to assess their injuries and move them to area hospitals. Delaney’s team of drivers then went through a post-accident analysis workshop with the help of one of the company’s driver trainers. “Tey discussed proper procedures that drivers are expected
to follow in the event of such an incident and completed the proper paperwork that they would normally fill out if they were involved in an accident,” added Begg. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Association of Pupil Transpor-
tation continued School Bus Safety Week with a mock disaster drill involving a crash between a school bus and an oil truck. “Tis was a huge event involving many agencies that worked to-
gether to make it a huge success,” said Barnstable Public Schools Transportation Director Sandy Gifford. “Te event provided an opportunity for first responders to see how they would be able to deal with a situation of this magnitude, should it ever occur.”n
For a full gallery of photos from the Tulare event, visit
www.stnon-
line.com/go/428. Delaney Bus Lines also has an online gallery from its event at
www.stnonline.com/go/399.
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