REGINA, Sask. — If you saw a lot of smoke coming from what looked like a ditched plane at Regina International Airport on Thursday morning, be aware that it wasn’t a real accident.
Instead, it was the airport’s full-scale emergency exercise, held every two years as required by Transport Canada.
The exercise calls upon all of the airport’s emergency partners, including fire crews from both the airport and Regina Fire and Protective Services, as well as EMS ambulances, police and other responders.
Kyla Antonini, YQR’s manager of public relations and customer experience, said it is a “very realistic, well-planned exercise where we have the response from the city as well as our team activating the EOC, the Emergency Operations Centre, at the airport. We're gathering information, our fire teams are working with Regina Fire to assess the scene and to administer aid as needed.”
For this exercise, they simulated a collision between a plane and a vehicle on the tarmac. The exercise took place in the morning around 8:30 a.m., but it was meant to simulate an early evening event.
Crews set off buckets of smoke into the air, and the airport's own fire department was first on the scene, followed soon after by Regina Fire and EMS vehicles.
Emergency crews helped the injured passengers depart from the grounded plane, and they were led to an area close to EMS vehicles where they were treated by emergency personnel. Meanwhile, other personnel were seen using the “jaws of life” on the vehicle stuck in front of the aircraft.
The “passengers” were actually volunteers, with more than 100 volunteers taking part. The plane they escaped from was actually a fuselage of a Q400 set up in a remote training area of the airport, with the Q400 itself being a typical aircraft model seen regularly flying in and out of the airport.
The simulated incident brought back memories of a collision involving an Air Canada plane and a ground vehicle at La Guardia airport in New York earlier this year.
In reality, officials said that incident had no bearing on what was chosen for this year’s emergency exercise, as they plan it out a year ahead of time.
For the actual simulation, Antonini said the goal is for it to be realistic.
“Transport Canada requires that they be realistic incidents, so something that could happen at an airport. We know today was a simulation of a plane and a vehicle, we know that happens. And so it is a very realistic probability that that could happen. We need to go through the motions. That's something that could actually happen.”
As for the planning that takes place, Fire Chief Kelly Schwartz of the Regina Airport Authority fire department said they get together with Public Safety to come up with a theme for the exercise.
“So we'll come up with that and then we'll get together … Once we get that formalized, then we'll get the other agencies together and formulate a plan with that.”
The emergency exercise happens every year, but in the off-year the airport does what is called a tabletop exercise in advance of the following year’s live simulation.
Antonini said that in a tabletop exercise, “we go through all the steps that we're doing in a conversational style. We walk through it, we talk about everyone that is activated in our city and their roles. And then when we do the full-scale exercise like we did today, we act it all out. We go through all the motions, everyone is here, their response time is real, and everyone plays their role.”
The live simulation is also an opportunity for all the various agencies to get a chance to work together in a co-ordinated fashion in case an incident does happen.
“The exercise is critical for all of our agencies,” said Gord Hewitt, deputy fire chief with Regina Fire and Protective Services.
"So we have a great partnership with the Regina Airport Authority and their fire department here. And so we don't get that many opportunities to train together, so we try to take the opportunities whenever we can.”
Hewitt said they do have a response procedure in place, and they would show up in a support role, but added a lot of times if there are going to be issues, it “could be potentially a communication breakdown.”
“So the opportunity for us to exercise together and work on our communication, familiarize ourselves with this location and this site, like I said, it's critical, I think, to both organizations.”
As for next steps following such a simulation, Schwartz said there is a debrief and an after-action report. After that, all the agencies get together to go over what happened and figure out how to improve the response.
“We have a meeting here, and we'll go over all the after-action reports, everybody that's put in their comments, and try to work through it and try to clarify and rectify those problems so we don't have to worry about it again. But the thing is we do these exercises so that we can learn from them. And once we learn from them, we make it better.”
