‘Mass casualty’ unit ready when crisis strikes
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Kyle Garrett and Kim Suvanto manned the Nodaway County Mass Casualty Response Squad pavilion during Monday’s Fourth of July celebration at Mozingo Lake Recreation Park. Formed in November 2015, MRCS consists of a contingent of emergency medical responders, technicians, nurses, and other personnel trained to operate a 100-patient triage center and field hospital, components of which are maintained by first-responder organizations in Maryville, Bethany, Cameron, and St. Joseph.
Representatives from Nodaway County’s newest emergency response organization set up shop at Mozingo Lake Recreation Park during Monday’s community Fourth of July celebration.
While prepared to administer first aid or handle any other emergencies that might have come up, Kim Suvanto and Kyle Garrett were really on hand to provide information and create public awareness about the newly formed Mass Casualty Response Squad.
In place since November, the squad consists of about a half-dozen core personnel, plus a much larger contingent of first-responders from throughout the area. All are volunteers.
Squad members each receive training in first aid, CPR, backboarding, basic life support, emergency vehicle operation, victim extrication, and other skills.
The goal of the training is to prepare participating first-responders to maintain and deploy a casualty response trailer and rescue truck, which is kept at the Nodaway County Ambulance District headquarters in Maryville.
The large trailer, when combined with similar units in Bethany, Cameron, and St. Joseph, carries gear that can be used to establish an emergency medical operations unit — essentially a triage unit coupled with a field hospital — capable of accommodating up to 100 patients.
In addition to the ambulance organizations involved, participating entities include St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City and Mosaic Life Care in St. Joseph.
Equipment packed into the Nodaway County unit includes a 20-foot by 20-foot triage tent, power generators, air compressors, lighting fixtures, medical equipment, and radios.
Acquired in 2008, the trailer has been deployed a couple of times during Missouri Hope, an annual large-scale disaster simulation held at the Mozingo Outdoor Education Recreation Area, a recreation and training compound operated by Northwest Missouri State University.
In the event of a genuine disaster, all four units, or any combination thereof, could conceivably be called up for deployment anywhere in the country. Their primary service area, however, is the Missouri Department of Public Safety’s Region H, which includes the same 15 northwest Missouri counties comprising Troop H of the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Those counties include: Andrew, Atchison, Buchanan, Caldwell, Clinton, Daviess, DeKalb, Gentry, Grundy, Harrison, Holt, Livingston, Mercer, Nodaway, and Worth.
The brainchild of Northwest Missouri State University Professor Mark Corson, a retired U.S. Army Reserve brigadier general who serves as MCRS captain, the unit was equipped and trained using a grant through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Suvanto, a certified emergency medical technician and volunteer Jackson Township firefighter, said the reason for splitting up the field hospital apparatus among four locations is to ensure that the entire operation is not destroyed should some disaster, say a tornado, strike one of the participating communities.
She said the trailers are ready to roll in the event of any large-scale emergency — everything from severe weather and flooding to a jetliner crash — that overwhelms local hospitals and other permanently based medical resources.
The decision to dispatch the squad, Suvanto said, can be made by one or a group of “incident command” officials, a chain of potential crisis managers that ranges from local police chiefs to the governor.
When not responding to fire alarms and accident calls, Suvanto works as a chemist for White Cloud Engineering & Construction in Maryville. And while her first-responder life is an avocation rather than a profession, she takes it very seriously indeed.
After earning her emergency medical responder credentials through the Nodaway County Ambulance District, Suvanto, 31, said she was hooked, and so signed up for EMT training — a more advanced level of preparation — at Northwest Technical School.
“I absolutely love what I do as a first responder,” she said while helping Garrett staff the MCRS pavilion during Monday’s lakeside festival. “I guess I wanted to join MCRS because being a firefighter and a first-responder with Jackson Township just plain wasn’t keeping me busy enough.”
As for Garrett, the 57-year-old contract maintenance consultant with Federal-Mogul in Maryville said he is indulging a fascination he’s had with medical response work since he was a youngster.
Volunteering for MCRS, he said, “was a really good way to get entry-level certification” as he begins what is essentially a second act.
“I would just hope that I can be there if somebody needs me,” Garrett said.
