By Sam Elliott
The Fishers Fire Dept. was home to a unique training exercise involving both city and state personnel March 15, as a mock disaster situation was staged to test officials’ resource management in the event of a major emergency.
A hypothetical tornado touching down through over a mile of Fishers land was the mock disaster training session’s inciting incident.
“It’s gone through Fishers, it’s taken out a school that had a basketball game going on, two apartment complexes have heavily been hit — multiple fatalities, multiple injuries — the Target Superstore was affected and then, just to throw a little extra spin into it, there was a FedEx truck that was tipped over and two suspicious males exited the vehicle, pointed back at the truck and shortly thereafter there was an explosion,” Fishers Fire Dept. Cpt. John Mehling said. “We throw a little terrorist event into the middle of it.”
Since recovery from such an event would take multiple days and require more manpower and resources than the City of Fishers has at its disposal, state incident management teams from District 5 and District 4 were brought into the mock disaster training to help manage the crises.
“It’s going to take multiple days, so we can’t use the same Fishers people continually,” Mehling said. “You’d usually be working 12-hour shifts before handing off to the next team… What we’re doing now isn’t about boots on the ground; this is about resource management. These guys aren’t talking about what’s going on right now; they’re now talking about what’s going to happen in the next 12 hours. What we left them with was ‘OK here’s where we’re at, here’s what we need you to do in the next 12 hours.’ That’s the way the system would continually go.”
Mayor Scott Fadness and various department heads worked out of city hall during the training session, handling the legal aspects involved and looking at the city’s long-term infrastructure recovery.
“It was really an extraordinary opportunity for our team to come together and learn how we can better serve our community — hopefully we never have to, but if we did — in its worst hour,” Fadness said.
