Ice Cube Drill

Regrettably, I do not have any pictures of this drill, but the dreaded day had finally come! It was actually supposed to be done yesterday, on Tuesday, but the folks on the drill site were going to start drilling that day, and asked to switch the drill to Monday. Management agreed in the hopes of catching us off guard, but by the time Thanksgiving Dinner rolled around on Saturday, everybody knew about the day switch! Ahhhh, small communities!!

The call came over loudspeaker and radio around 8:10 in the morning that there was a fuel spill and at least one person down out at the Ice Cube drill site (that started the drill). Cully and I were out at ARO starting our day, which was good since it gave us a chance to see how long it would take us to get from ARO out to a site as far away as Ice Cube. He and I were about halfway back to the station, and first responders were already on scene. I didn't feel too badly about not being there in a hurry...found out later that by the time the first responders showed up, one of the other drillers on site had grabbed the "victim", pulled him into a building to get him out of the cold and the first trauma responders were assessing and attending to the victim while a couple others were dealing with the spill.

The scenario was that there was a person driving a loader, took his eye off where he was going, and ran into a fuel container and punctured it. In his haste, he tried to get out of the vehicle and stop the spill, but slipped on the ice and sustained a head injury...unfortunately falling into the spill, so he was being covered with fuel (again, part of the scenario). One of the site workers found him, and got him out of the spill and into shelter. That's when we all started showing up. When I got there, the victim was minutes away from being transported back to the station, where the Doc was ready with a team of people to get him from the vehicle up to Club Med on the second floor of the station. The spill had stopped and the fire team and the Hazmat person on site were containing that, making sure it didn't spread. The person that was controlling the scene until I showed up set me up pretty good. When I was able to take control from him, the coordination of the different teams was set up, all I really had to do was keep the station manager appraised of the situation as it continued to develop, and then call the drill over, and start getting people back to the station.

The whole drill took about 45 minutes to complete, and I think the teams did a really good job, given the fact that everyone is spread out over a pretty good area. ARO is about 1/4 mile from station, and Ice Cube is about a half mile beyond that, so everyone got on scene pretty quickly in my opinion, and that was about what we heard from the debrief at the end of the scenario. Heck of a way to start the morning, though! sheesh!!!