An emergency drill which took place in Jerusalem last week simulated a situationin which there are a great number of casualties. Arutz Sheva visited the scene of the drill.
The drill practiced a scenario in which terrorists blow up a bus, resulting in the killing and wounding of many.
“We had to practice this MCI (massive casualty incident) in order to get our volunteers to really know what do in case of a real emergency,” explained Eli Beer, President of United Hatzalah of Israel. “We do it together with Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew University. We got over 100 United Hatzalah volunteers come to the scene with motorcycles and their private cars and ambulances and treat the victims.”
Beer said that the volunteers have to gauge the situation and determine who is in critical condition and who can wait a while longer before receiving treatment.
“They have to learn how to decide who’s going to live and who’s going to die,” he said. “This is a very hard job and a very big responsibility, but we teach our volunteers to be the most professional in the world.”
About 15 ambulances took part in the drill, alongside medical students supervised by Professor Avi Rivkind, the head of the department of general surgery and the trauma unit of Hadassah Hospital.
“I think the drill was a great success in terms of training the paramedics,” said United Hatzalah Chairman Zeev Kashash. “We remember the big terror attacks involving exploding buses from the 1990s, and thank G-d in the past few years we haven’t experienced such a difficult event, but I think it’s important for paramedics to always be trained and ready for such incidents.”
“I hope Israel always stays in ‘drill mode’ and we’ll never have any big events, but if we do we should be the most experienced and we should have the ability to come and respond and save the most lives,” added Beer.
