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CNN Live Saturday

Baltimore Conducts Mass Casualty Drill

Aired July 13, 2002 - 17:07   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Baltimore's Ravens Stadium, site of a fictional terror attack in the recent film "The Sum of All Fears" is helping officials prepare for the real thing today. They're doing it in the form of emergency mass casualty drills, simulating a blast and a release of toxic chemicals. In Washington, CNN's Kathleen Koch is just back from Baltimore with a look at how it all works.

KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Fredricka, well, if you've stumbled into the several square block area of downtown Baltimore today where this drill was going on, you might have been pretty terrified, because what you had were hundreds of volunteers very dramatically made up -- blood dripping down their face, oozing wounds on their hands. From what Baltimore was simulating a toxic chemical attack by terrorists, terrorists who set this off, supposedly again, simulated, in a parking lot at Raven Stadium, same site that was illustrated in the movie as the site of a terrorist attack.

What they did is they had these volunteers gradually filter to the University of Maryland's Medical Center just a few blocks away, and that's a hospital that normally would have been prepared to handle 20, 35 seriously injured people flowing in in an emergency situation. Today, they handled 230, and yes, there were some problems.

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DR. TOM SCALEA, UNIV. OF MARYLAND SHOCK TRAUMA CENTER: I don't think it's realistic to think that you're going to blow up a stadium, have a bioterrorism attack, and have 200 people land on your door without notice and not have glitches in the system. That's not realistic. We ran out of equipment. We would run out of equipment at times if this was real. You learn to improvise. This is not going to be a totally smooth process.

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KOCH: Another issue that cropped up was the heat, the severe heat. The decontamination suits that you see these workers wearing right now as they would very carefully spray down every volunteer patient and scrub them down to get off these fake toxic chemicals, the suits got so hot people were becoming dehydrated. So for about 15 minutes, they stopped the exercise dead right in the middle and gave these people a chance to get something to drink.

Now, Fredricka, clearly that's not a real-life scenario. You can't just tell victims of a real terrorist attack, wait for 15 minutes until we're ready.

What they believed they were learning today is where the problems were. There were also communication problems, getting word through to who needed what, where, when. And so they're going to be working out these glitches. They say their next exercise they want to try to be ready for not 230, but some 500 victims. Just downtown Baltimore they fear that there are just so many potential terrorist sites -- Raven Stadium, where the Orioles play as well, Camden Yards. So they just want to be prepared.

WHITFIELD: Now, Kathleen, given the movie "Sum of All Fears" talked about an attack on Baltimore, did the people or the residents in that community feel like their nerves were frayed further given that they're seeing this drill being played out?

KOCH: There were a lot of people. We talked to David Modell, president of the Ravens today. They had a mass evacuation of Ravens Stadium today to practice. And he said, yes, his nerves were very frayed by watching that movie.

But they put out a lot of public service announcements in the city as they have in other cities, where since 9-11 they've been having similar drills, just to make sure that everyone knows that this is indeed a practice, because we've all been through so much since then and they don't want to do anything to further frighten anyone.

WHITFIELD: All right. Thanks very much, Kathleen Koch from Washington.

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