The Bridgetown High School Emergency Services Cadets get to participate in a lot of exciting activities throughout the year. On top of all the camps held each term there are opportunities to be involved in other Emergency Services training sessions.

This opportunity was recently taken up by three senior cadets who helped by acting as casualties in a combined Bridgetown & Nannup SES training session. The cadets were made up with a variety of injuries. Cameron Cadell was the most seriously “injured” of the three cadets with a spinal injury resulting in a lack of feeling in his legs. Darcy Woodhouse had a real bone taped to his leg to simulate a broken shin bone with some red texta simulating some bleeding from the wound and Peta Cadell had a head injury with texta simulating bleeding from the wound and also her ear.

Once make up was applied the cadets were positioned strategically throughout a bus which was simulating a building that had collapsed from an earthquake. The bus was used because it was narrow and made it difficult to extract the three casualties. To make it a bit more interesting Peta was positioned in a big box within the bus just to make it even more difficult to get her out. Darcy had a few chairs piled on top of him.

The job of the SES rescuers was to find the casualties, do an initial triage to decide who needed to be extracted first and then safely remove the cadets from the potentially dangerous environment. In a real situation, it can be very difficult to decide if a casualty should be moved or further treated on site. In a real earthquake, there are usually after-shocks which can make unstable buildings extremely dangerous.

In this particular exercise, Darcy, with his broken leg was removed first. He was still able to move quite easily and as long as he didn’t put any weight on his broken leg he could help his rescuers. Peta, with her head injury, was next. Part way through her extraction she fell unconscious and made it a little more difficult to be moved. it was decided to leave Cameron with his spinal injury until last so there would be more room to manoeuvre him.  Since he had a suspected spinal injury s spinal board was slid under him and then he was lifted above the bus seats and then carefully passed between rescuers through the bus door.

Once out of the bus, the rescue was not finished. Each of the three cadets needed to be slashed into a basket stretcher and carried about 50 meters over rough ground with a big rocky climb in the middle.

The exercise started at about 6:30 and was finished by about 8:30, with all three cadets safely delivered to the simulated ambulance officers waiting to provide further treatment.

After the cadets were cleaned up and everyone ate sausage rolls and chocolate slice made by Robyn Trainer, one of the SES members who organised the event, the cadets participated in the exercise de-brief. The SES volunteers were very happy to get feedback from the cadets about how they perceived the rescue. Often in SES exercises a “dummy” is rescued. Unfortunately, with a dummy, if you drop them or hit them in the face they do not complain. The cadets gave great feedback, and were especially happy with the amount of explanation of what was going to be done and reassurance given to the cadets by the SES rescuers.

I would like to thank Kevin Wrightson and Robyn Trainer, SES volunteers, who organised the training activity and also the members of the Bridgetown and Nannup SES who participated. On this occasion the SES only wanted three casualties. There were at least a dozen cadets who were keen to help out so we hope there will be further opportunities in the future for the cadets to help the emergency services in their training.