Yurtville is one tragedy after another but Dubois County is ready
Gary Yurt is having fun and the other forty people at the Habig Center in Jasper have no idea how much fun he’s about to have at their expense. Those forty people represent municipalities, counties, and companies from Dubois County and the surrounding region. They’re standing around “Yurtville”, Gary’s model tragedy town he uses to teach municipalities and companies about disaster response.
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“Industrial Safety and Training Services (ISTS) is the name of my company and here today we have 125 years of combined experience in disaster response,” Yurt explains. His crew consists of Jody Meiman, a battalion chief over 500 fire fighters in Louisville, Mike Stone, Lieutenant from the Lexington Fire Department in charge of Hazardous Material Response, and Yurt himself who retired from the Louisville Fire Department.
The town is his creation as well. Yurtville stretches over 16 feet long and is about 8 feet wide and consists of cardboard buildings representing any kind of industry you could find in a town as well as libraries, utilities, and residences. Toy cars and emergency vehicles are sitting on the roads and toy figures are walking down the sidewalks. On a table nearby is the typical stuff you find in a kids art supply box waiting to be used to train the men and women in charge of protecting the brick and mortar and lives of our towns.
The first scenario is about to begin and everyone is wearing safety vests with labels like “police”, “operations”, “public safety”, and even “water department”. Yurt explains that we may see some chaos in a moment. “They are put in a situation where they don’t have all day to respond. They’ve gotta act in a matter of minutes, just like in a real scenario.”
Suddenly radios start beeping and Yurt announces over the radio that there has been a chlorine leak at the water treatment plant. A tanker on a train car has ruptured and smoke is now wafting off the table near the plant. A wail of sirens begins to come from a speaker on the table and the hissing of the leak gets louder as Yurt, playing dispatch announces the rupture is getting worse.
Glen Kissling, Huntingburg Fire Chief, begins to direct the response walking up to the table and reaching for a toy car. He knocks over some scenery in the process and his group laughs, but the scenario continues and they quickly get down to business.
Yurt continues to dispatch police and fire departments when the speaker begins emitting screams and a dog starts barking. In the large training room the noise reverberates off the walls and doesn’t stop; it mixes with the sirens and the hissing. It is chaos.
Some of the groups are looking at each other with nervous smiles but Yurt and his crew are in their element. Jody has a vest on that says he is a hotel manager. He walks up to Kissling and asks about the situation. Kissling in response asks a question about the scenario. Jody deadpans, “I don’t know, I’m the hotel manager.”
Kissling gets back into the scene and sets up an emergency management station with his personnel. He begins giving orders as well. Mike Wallingford, another instructor with Yurt, comes to me and tells me to be a nosy reporter and demand information from Kissling’s crew.
The scenario doesn’t appear to be going that well and according to Yurt this is normal for the first run, but the group soon begins to get into its element. Firefighters from Holland begin setting up a cordon around the scene and the police begin helping.
The response continues for some time and ends with a debriefing about the scenario. The group will then repeat the process three more times with different scenarios requiring different responses and different expertise.
The goal is to learn in a hands on environment but this is also the precursor for another upcoming exercise.
“This is the first time we’ve done an exercise like this and the plan is to have a full scale exercise in October based on one of the scenarios that occur today.” Tammy Miller, Dubois County Emergency Management Director, said.
