Great Bend firefighters faced an unusual rescue situation Thursday when a car smashed into the back of a school bus. Even though it was a training scenario and not an actual catastrophe, the learning experience was authentic.
The bus and car were real.
Sharon Jenkins, transportation director at Great Bend USD 428, said the school district received a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to replace a 2000 Blue Bird bus with an energy efficient model. The new bus, scheduled to arrive in the next week or two, has an extra heater than can keep the bus warm without running the motor.
“The stipulation of the grant was we had to destroy this bus,” Jenkins said.
Battalion Chief John Stettinger at the Great Bend Fire Department said Marmie Motors donated a car for the exercise, and the crew dropped the bus onto the car to simulate an override – where the car becomes wedged under a larger vehicle. Marmie’s, Nobody’s Auto Recycling and Marshall’s Towing & Recovery service are good about donating vehicles for firefighter training, but getting bus is a rare event, he said. “This is only the second time we’ve got to cut on a bus for real.”
Making the best use of the opportunity, GBFD called the Kansas Fire & Rescue Training Institute of the University of Kansas, which sent instructor Josh Rogers for the day at no charge. Firefighters spent the morning in a classroom and then headed to the training area behind Fire Station II on West 10th St.
When firefighters perform an extrication, Stettinger said, “we actually remove the vehicle from the patient,” and not the other way around. A school bus creates special problems, because it has a higher center of gravity and there is more weight and more fuel to deal with. It also has the capacity to carry 22 passengers, which is more than GBFD ambulances can accommodate.
Part of the training involves having agreements with other agencies. If a bus full of students did require rescue, another school bus would be put to use for transporting them, and Great Bend Regional Hospital would be alerted to stand by for a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI), Stettinger said.
For the extrication, the first step is to “crib” or stabilize the bus with wooden blocks and pneumatic struts. Then a firefighter can enter the bus while someone else disconnects the battery. Then the goal is to get people safely off the bus.
Rogers allowed the firefighters to figure out how they would tackle each step. At the end of the exercise, they share what they’d experienced.
“We tried a couple of different things; they didn’t all work as planned,” Rogers said.
Next the bus was pushed onto its side for a different training scenario. Firefighters used saws to create an escape hatch in the side of the bus, and battering rams to pop the windows out of the back.
Jenkins and her staff stood by, at one point asking a firefighter to demonstrate exiting from the safety hatch on the roof of the bus. USD 428 also has drills for disaster, but it’s rare to have a full-scale teaching tool.
Although Stettinger said he’s never faced a real-life emergency similar to Thursday’s scenario in Barton County, he recalled a situation in Ellsworth County in the late 1990s. Even though buses are significantly safer than they were 10 or 15 years ago, he said, one never knows when training such as this will save a life – or lives.