ST. LOUIS — Lindbergh High School students played victims on Wednesday and wore fake injuries and makeup while helping the Mehlville Fire Protection District conduct its mass casualty bus crash simulation.


What You Need To Know

  • The exercise was part of the department’s week-long training designed to refine emergency response capabilities

  • It focused on assessing and responding to simulated bus crash scenarios and involved multiple patients with varying injuries to challenge the critical care paramedics, nurses and fire medics under pressure

  • Students had markings on their face, arms and legs, resembling injuries

The exercise was part of the department’s week-long training designed to refine emergency response capabilities.

It focused on assessing and responding to simulated bus crash scenarios and involved multiple patients with varying injuries to challenge the critical care paramedics, nurses and fire medics under pressure.

“What we’re trying to work on here is responding to these mass casualty events and making sure that we’re triaging those patients and getting the most critical patients to the right places in a timely manner,” said Darick Day, battalion chief EMS training officer.

The training was led by Day, Zach Absolon, battalion chief fire training officer, and Jenny Rieker, director of mobile integrated health.

“We’ve taken away trying to get better with our command structure. A lot of these responders are used to taking care of patients right away,” Absolon said.

“When you have this type of incident, you have to be able to take a step back and realize how many patients you actually do have and set up the command structure to get the patients taken off this bus to a treatment area and to eventually get them transported to definitive care.”

Students had markings on their face, arms and legs, resembling injuries.

“These incidents, we just don’t run that often, so what we try to do here is (make) this as real life as possible to get that hands-on practice,” Day said.

He added the training is an invaluable experience to the crews.

“We’ve had some prior bus crashes and a few large patient events. It’s not an uncommon occurrence,” Day said.

Absolon and Day thanked Lindbergh Schools for providing volunteers and a school bus that will be decommissioned.

Eleventh-grader Gabby McBride said the firefighters and medics were serious and helpful during the bus crash simulation.

“It was kind of scary coming because I just didn’t really know what was going on, but then once it started, it was fun and I think it was a good experience,” she said.

McBride pretended to have a large cut on her arm.

“I thought it was interesting how they separated us by color due to our injuries,” she said.

Eleventh-grader Sydney Welsh said she learned how firefighters and medics operate in a mass casualty scenario. Welsh pretended to have abdominal pain and internal bleeding.

“It was helpful to learn how they triage and different ways that they act depending on what your injuries are and how they take care of you,” she said.

Eleventh-grader Rachel Branham said she learned how the medics and fire personnel assess injured patients. 

“It was cool seeing how all of them worked together to help us and get us off the bus as safely as they could,” she said.

Branham pretended to have bruises on her arms and an injured leg.  

“It was a lot of fun, especially when we got to put all the makeup on,” she said.