Ken Ludwig played the victim well yesterday. "I had a steel
rod in my leg," the stocky member of the Northwood Volunteer
Fire Department said nonchalantly. "But I cured myself -
I pulled it out"
And immediately after, Mr. Ludwig helped carry fellow "disaster
victims" to waiting ambulances that whisked them from Toledo
Express Airport to city hospitals
Mr. Ludwig, with his mock leg injury, was one of dozens of volunteers
who participated in a disaster drill Friday and yesterday on Toledo
Port Authority property west of the airport's passenger terminal
Doctors, nurses, and "victims," all clad m fluorescent
green vests, hustled back and forth m the mud among eight green
military tents and a makeshift ambulance parking lot.
The various maladies of the "victims" were written on
their vests: arm missing, head injuries, punctured lung. One woman
even pretended the stress of disaster sent her Into early labor.
The two-day exercise differed from most disaster drills. Instead
of responding to a simulated local calamity, members of the Toledo
Disaster Medical Assistance Team were practicing treatment on
victims who might have been flown here from a catastrophe hundreds
of miles away.
An example of such a disaster, spokesman Phil Terman said, would
be a strong earthquake along the New Madrid fault in Missouri
The strongest earthquakes in US history - some with an estimated
intensity of 8.7 on the Richter Scale -struck along the fault
in 1811-12. The quakes shook New York City and rang church hells
as far away as Boston.
Officials have warned that if similarly strong earthquakes hit
the area around New Madrid, Mo., now, they would cause widespread
damage in the Midwest. Hospitals in St Louis and Memphis would
be able to take care of only a small fraction of the injured.
The rest would have to be flown by helicopter and cargo plane
to other cities.
Some of the 20 federal disaster medical assistance teams across
the United States would set up at air-fields to which the victims
would be flown. Team doctors would decide who needed to be taken
to hospitals, who could wait for treatment, and who would need
immediate treatment at the tent hospital at the airfield.
"What we're trying to do is give a little forethought to
it," Mr. Terrnan said. "We're trying to track patients,
see what communications problems we. have and try to work them
out. We're finding out what supplies we need. We're finding out
a lot of these things as we go through [the drill]"
Toledo has four of the 20 or so disaster medical assistance teams,
Mr. Terman said, and they are the only civilian teams in the.
nation The rest, he said, comprise doctors. from hospitals run
by the veterans Administration or the armed forces.
The four Toledo teams are staffed solely by volunteers. They are
based at Medical College Hospitals, St. Charles Hospital, St.
Vincent Medical Center, and the Toledo Hospital, said Mr Terman,
spokesman for Toledo Hospital and a volunteer
The Toledo-based teams work on minimal budgets, relying Friday
and yesterday on food donated by restaurants, a field hospital
lent by federal agencies, and tents and cots lent by the. Air
National Guard. REMSNO, Lucas County's emergency medical service,
provided. meeting space and communications.
About 120 to 150 people are in the Toledo teams, said Dr. Paul Rep, a doctor at The Toledo Hospital's emergency center and one of the early organizers of the Toledo team. He said he got the Idea to start the first civilian disaster medical assistance team after a colleague complained - about being summoned to a poorly organized accident scene a few years ago.