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April 19, 2008

Schools prepare for mock disaster

By Brittany Woodby

BWOODBY@CULLMANTIMES.COM

Cullman County Schools are preparing to protect students during potential disasters by practicing evacuation and response skills now.

The school board approved an agreement with Ryans Creek Baptist Church at Thursday’s meeting to secure the church as an evacuation site for Cold Springs students.

“We started preparing this agreement about six months ago,” Cullman County Schools Superintendent Hank Allen said. “Ryan’s Creek is close enough to Cold Springs’ campus, yet far enough away to take students away from any catastrophe that might have happened.”

The board and the church reached the agreement only weeks before the school system holds a mock disaster at Cold Springs.

“The mock disaster planned is simply so we can actually go through our procedures to respond to a disaster,” Allen said. “This will not only be practice for the school system but it will give the schools the opportunity to work with other agencies during response.”

Allen said the Cullman County Sheriff’s Department, county fire departments, the Emergency Management Agency and county road departments have been part of the mock disaster planning. On May 12, Allen said these agencies will respond to a fake gas leak at a propane tank near the schools.

“We will evacuate students to Ryans Creek, and this should show us how much time it takes to evacuate students, get them on buses and to the site,” Allen said. “We will utilize the emergency phone system to coordinate parent pick up.”

Though students will be evacuated, Allen said the mock disaster will not take away from much instructional time during the day.

While this is the first time the system has staged an incident at Cold Springs schools, Allen said crews responded to a mock disaster last summer at Hanceville schools.

“We had an actual perpetrator come on campus, with a gun and he took some students hostage in a classroom there,” he said. “Everything was mocked, but we video taped it so we could go back and learn from our mistakes.”

Through that practice, Allen said he and others realized they were not quite as prepared as they had thought to manage a student evacuation.

“We realized we needed to secure a site off-campus to take students,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons we made the deal with Ryans Creek Baptist.”

Allen said the school board is working to secure agreements with various churches and community centers in areas near county schools to allow use of those facilities in the event of an emergency evacuation. Allen said some schools may require agreements with multiple facilities in their communities, due to student population size.

Eventually, the board intends to hold a mock disaster at each school to practice that school’s and community’s disaster response plans.

“After the Hanceville mock crisis, we started planning the Cold Springs event,” Allen said. “Our plan is to do a mock disaster for each school. ... Each year we want to try to stage one.”

Allen said the biggest challenge to organizing the disaster practices is coordinating times which work out with the other agencies.

“Timing is not always as convenient as we’d like it to be, because we have to work with so many other agencies to get them together,” he said. “It takes a whole lot of planning going into it to bring those agencies together. We’ve already met three times at Cold Springs, and had six different agencies represented at our meeting the other day. There’s a lot of manpower and coordination that goes into it.”

Allen said funding for the mock disasters has not been a problem and the board sets aside money in its budget to sponsor the events.

“We’ve been in partnership with these other agencies, and they are not charging us anything for this,” he said. “We’re thankful to them for keeping those costs down. The actual cost is not a significant amount of money.”

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