Airport prepares for ‘unthinkable’ emergency

BANGOR – Early Thursday in the transit lounge at Bangor International Airport, two dozen people were preparing for the worst. And that’s a good thing.

Representing local, state and federal emergency agencies, local hospitals and other organizations, the group is planning for next year’s disaster drill, required of the airport every three years.

It’s akin to putting together a huge puzzle, making sure the pieces fit together, which is not always easy. Although the group did not agree Thursday on every assessment, what they could concur on is that the time to work on interagency cooperation is not during a real disaster.

“It really is a big puzzle and it needs to come together smoothly,” said Capt. Hector Cyr, training and safety officer for the fire department at the Maine Air National Guard base in Bangor.

Airports across the country are required by the Federal Aviation Administration to test their emergency plans as part of their certification.

Although BIA is a city operation, the preparations being made now and the drill scheduled for next May involve many agencies outside the city.

Thursday’s meeting included representatives from Penobscot County, airlines, the Transportation Security Administration and the Air National Guard.

The logistics of responding to a disaster at the airport are tremendous, officials said, from securing the area and maintaining the integrity of a crime scene to coordinating ambulances, tracking patients and making sure there is sufficient medical equipment on scene.

The work that is being done now is intended to streamline the response to what Cyr described as the “chaos everywhere” of a real disaster, such as this upcoming drill’s scenario of a terrorist exploding a bomb aboard a plane at BIA.

“We’re getting rid of the red tape,” Bangor Assistant Fire Chief Vance Tripp said after Thursday’s meeting.

Such events no longer seem far-fetched since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I think that 9-11 has shown us that the unthinkable is thinkable,” Tom Robertson, Penobscot County Emergency Management Agency director, said after the meeting.

Although security efforts have been ramped up at the airport, that’s no reason to let down one’s guard, according to Maj. Dale Rowley, exercise evaluation team chief of the Air National Guard’s 101st Civil Engineering Squadron.In just half an hour on the Internet, Rowley said, he managed to download information on arrival and departure times for planes, including those carrying troops, photographs of BIA, details about planes and personnel and the scheduled changeovers of the local police department.

“We probably have to acknowledge the fact that they’re going to find out everything they want to know about us,” Rowley said, referring to potential terrorists.

Rather than remove that information, stripping everything from public access, officials need to be more diligent and aware of their surroundings and the potential for problems, Rowley said.

Clearly, communications is one of the most important aspects and one of the biggest potential pitfalls in an emergency.

“Communications is always a problem, no matter what,” Bangor police Sgt. D. Ward Gagner, head of the department’s airport division, said.

In the case of a disaster, police, fire and other emergency response agencies from around Penobscot County and beyond will converge on the airport, some using different frequencies, Robertson said.

Bangor operates its own dispatch center while the Penobscot Regional Communications Center dispatches for most of the rest of the county. The agencies would have to be coordinated.

Streamlined communications also was on the minds of representatives from Eastern Maine Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital. They pressed for having a direct line in the chain of command. As it stands right now, the hospitals have to go through a dispatch or ambulance loading officer at the scene to reach the incident commander, they said.

“We need to be able to communicate with you well and you need to be able to communicate with us well,” Barbara Hildreth, St. Joseph Hospital emergency management coordinator, said. “I think it is time that the hospitals need to be included in the incident command.”

Kathy Knight, emergency preparedness director for Eastern Maine Healthcare, EMMC’s parent company, likened the situation to the game of gossip in which a message is passed from person to person and ends up being different from what it was originally.

One airline representative told the group that three months ago, a man had a heart attack on a plane and the ambulance went to the wrong location at the airport, delaying the arrival of the paramedics by four to five minutes.

Other officials said that there are personnel under the incident commander tapped to help direct the operation, including a person set aside for emergency medical services.

“There’s so much going on,” Bangor Assistant Fire Chief Darrell Cyr said. He added that the incident commander needs to be able to see the overall picture of what’s going on and delegate some responsibilities to others.