BOTHELL – Dave Polonsky had the situation under control.
“OK, Number 5, we’re checking in,” Polonsky said, radio in hand. “We’ve got a 70-year-old woman, she’s probably in shock and is going to need to be transported to the main base. Team three out.”
Dan Bates / The Herald
The 77-year-old Polonsky, dressed in a hard hat and lime-green vest, bent over to inspect the victim. She wore a blue jumpsuit with a red and white stripe. Her head was made of Styrofoam.
“Most people 71 years old have Styrofoam heads,” Polonsky later explained.
For now, he kept his concentration on the injured woman, who was just one of a dozen stuffed dummies sprawled in yards around a cul-de-sac at the Senior Community of Wandering Creek.
Polonsky and team partner Gus Carlson, 81, were going house to house on the street. Each house had a disaster of its own: some were on fire, some had debris covering entryways, and some had sparks flying off wires on the ground – or at least that’s what the red pieces of paper posted outside the houses said.
The pair were volunteer block captains, there to help assess the neighborhood in case of an actual disaster in the 293-home gated community.
Christine Colmore, a program training coordinator with the Snohomish County Emergency Management Department, helped George Anderson, 64, set up Thursday’s disaster drill.
More than 20 block captains showed up for the community’s first run-through of a program its members hope will save lives in a worst-case scenario
Anderson, who was in charge of the community’s seven-member Disaster Control Committee, started making disaster response plans last year. The community raised money with a corned beef and cabbage feed in March and took donations to spend $7,000 on a 15-foot trailer and a load of water bottles, fire extinguishers and first-aid kits.
“The people are really behind it,” Anderson said.
Colmore said this was the first retirement community that Snohomish County works with that has taken the initiative to organize a response plan.
“Just to see it come to fruition, that’s so cool,” she said.
The concept for a disaster response plan was floated in 1992, but no one ever made it happen.
“So I decided I just wanted to get it done,” Anderson said.
It was the first of many disaster drills, Anderson said. He hopes the 30-plus block captains will train twice a year to keep them ready for anything.
Thursday’s drill went off with only a few glitches.
Nine nurses and two doctors who live in the community volunteered to run the triage center at the clubhouse. Meanwhile, a handful of teams worked the disaster area a couple of blocks down the street. They inventoried on clipboards what was wrong with each house and radioed in for help when necessary.
Before Polonsky and Carlson were taking care of the victim at house 1113, teammates Vern Gochanour, Loran “Grit” Gritten and Rudy Bankson were across the street assessing damage to another home. “Smells of sewer in the area,” read a note on the yard.
“There’s not a lot you can do about sewer smells,” said Gochanour, who was making fun of each disaster site while his teammates busily took notes on their clipboard.
At the next house, there was another dummy sprawled on the ground.
“What’s wrong with this guy?” Gochanour asked, looking at the white note card listing the dummy’s condition. “Oh, he’s 83 years old.”
Bankson had a solution: “Bring in a wheelbarrow,” he said.
Later, Polonsky said he was happy with how the drill was going.
“This is the first time, and there’ll be a million mistakes, I’m sure I’ve made a few already,” he said. “We just need to practice.”
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