By Cara Leahy, Student Reporter
Nineteen ACU students became victims of a plane crash at the Abilene Regional Airport on Friday morning.
The crash was part of a disaster drill conducted every three years to monitor the actions of local emergency response teams in the event of a large-scale crisis.
The scenario was that an airplane had made an emergency landing after an active TB patient was discovered on board. Another plane then crashed into the first aircraft, wounding multiple passengers and scattering the halves of the fuselage across the runway, said Don Green, director of Aviation.
Students from an ACU stage makeup class volunteered to portray victims of the crash, while students from Cooper High School ROTC program wandered the scene, adding a sense of confusion. The professor in charge of the ACU class, Sandy Freeman, said she had been interested in doing drills like this for some time before Friday’s event.
“I originally wanted to do this as a learning exercise for the makeup class, but the real benefit is exposure to these kinds of [stage] wounds and amputations,” said Freeman, associate professor of theatre.
Although the students did not create their own injuries, Freeman’s class was given the opportunity to observe the techniques of moulage experts brought in specifically for the drill. Moulage is the art of applying mock injuries for the purpose of training Emergency Response Teams and other medical and military personnel.
“When they start to have these drills, they call us,” said Sherry Solomon, one of two moulage artists brought in for the drill. “The hospital tells us what they need, what injuries they want. They ask for the kinds of things they don’t see on a regular basis, something as massive as what they might experience with a plane crash.”
For this drill, Solomon and her fiancé, Bob Wimberly, the primary moulage expert, made their own prosthetic wounds, including shattered bones and a protruding eyeball.
“I was excited,” said Shelly Tarter, sophomore theatre major from Shallow Water. “My injury was second and third degree burns to my face and hands.”
Other students featured broken bones and various burns, which were described on cards they wore around their necks. The most important issue, however, was not a wound, but a disease.
Sebastian Karlsson, sophomore theatre major from Sweden, was the victim infected with active tuberculosis. As an added surprise for the response teams, Karlsson chose to speak only in Swedish, pretending he could only understand a limited amount of the English spoken to him.
Throughout the three-hour exercise, emergency responders worked not only to save the lives of the victims, but also to find a means to communicate with Karlsson, eventually locating an iPhone application that allowed them to translate sentences for Karlsson to read.
Meanwhile, ACU students were diagnosed according to the severity of their injuries and sent to nearby hospitals. Those with head injuries were the first to be treated, while those who could walk were guided to a nearby shuttle bus.
The drill ended nearly three hours after it began with boxed lunches for the volunteers and a shuttle bus back to the students’ respective campuses. The ACU victims were allowed to keep their prosthetic wounds, including one student’s simulated arm amputation.
For Wimberly and Solomon, it was just another day’s work. Wimberly packed away his makeup and applicators into a suitcase-sized kit as the students left, lifting up a half-used container of dark stage blood.
“Fun stuff,” Wimberly said.
